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The best way to avoid a questionable bullpen is for a starter to pitch deep into the game. Aníbal Sánchez made for an unlikely candidate to do so, as he was the worst starting pitcher in baseball this season the third time through the batting order. But unlikely or not, Sánchez took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, was rarely in any trouble, and gave the Nationals exactly what they needed in the first game of the NLCS. Sean Doolittle got the final four outs of the game and Washington jumped out to an early series lead before its big three of Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin could even take the mound.

Sánchez is known for mixing his pitches, and he played to the Cardinals scouting report, throwing fewer of the four-seam fastballs the Cardinals like and opting for a sinker he doesn’t use with regularity. On the season, Sánchez threw his sinker to right-handed hitters just 13% of the time, but through four innings he tripled that percentage. As the game wore on, he featured his fastball less as its velocity diminished, but the Cardinals couldn’t take advantage. And even when they got close, they were ultimately stymied. Ryan Zimmerman made what might have been a no-hitter saving play in the eighth inning on a hard-hit ball by Tommy Edman.

Sometimes it’s just not your night. Two batters later, Sánchez’s countryman, José Martínez (H/T Enrique Rojas), hit a solid single; with the no-hitter over, Sean Doolittle came in to get the final out of the eighth. Read the rest of this entry »

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“OUTCOME, n. A particular type of disappointment… judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal nonsense; the wisdom of an act is to be judged by the light that the doer had when he performed it.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Coming up this early in this baseball autopsy series, the Padres find themselves in the midst of a number of disappointing teams in search of a direction. The Padres do have a direction, they just haven’t gone far enough along the road that they should be stopping for coffee and bathroom breaks. Of the teams that have been covered so far in this series, the Padres are the first one that I’m legitimately optimistic about when it comes to their 2020 record.

The Setup

People have a tendency to not use the word “mediocre” correctly. Many use it as a synonym for awful, which it is not. Mediocre is an eternal C- student, something of continually below-average quality without being a grand failure. The post-Gwynn Padres may be the best example of a mediocre franchise.

With losing records in 11 of the past 12 seasons, the Padres never really descended into the full “farce” category, never losing 100 games or failing to make the 70-win line in consecutive seasons. The Padres as a franchise never really elicit an LOL reaction, let alone a full-bore ROFLMAO; they’re the team that you’d occasionally remember exists when your favorite team is on a road trip. Even the uniforms reflected this state of affairs. The current blue-and-white uniforms aren’t cringe material like the White Sox experiment with collars and shorts, and they aren’t obscenely odd like the Turn Ahead the Clock jerseys that assumed everyone in the future would be extremely near-sighted. They’re just bland and forgettable, like if you were using the create-a-team feature in a baseball video game and forgot to change the jersey from DefaultTeam1. Read the rest of this entry »

After two very different Division Series, the two strongest teams in the AL by win totals and run differentials will meet in the ALCS. The Yankees (103-59) won just two games more than the Twins during the regular season, and were outhomered by one, yet they continued their post-millennial postseason dominance of Minnesota, beating them in a Division Series for the fifth time in the past 17 seasons, outscoring them by a combined total of 23-7 and producing the round’s only sweep. The Astros (107-55) looked as though they might sweep of the Rays as well after Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole produced two of the postseason’s most stifling performances to date, yet they needed the full five games to advance thanks to some strong pitching by the Rays, who kept most of the Astros’ big bats at bay.

This series is a real heavyweight bout. It’s the fifth time that two 100-win teams have matched up in a postseason series during the Wild Card era, all of which have taken place 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), the subsequent ALCS matchup between those Red Sox and the Astros (103-59), and the aforementioned Yankees-Twins ALDS this year. In terms of combined wins by the two teams, this pairing is second only to last year’s Red Sox-Astros ALCS. Additionally, of course, this is a rematch of the 2017 ALCS, which was won by the Astros in a seven-game series during which home teams went undefeated. Houston has home-field advantage this time around as well, though they’re the one team from this pair who has yet to win a postseason game on the road. The series opens in Houston on Saturday, October 12, at 8 pm. Read the rest of this entry »

After two elimination games on Wednesday night, the National League Championship Series has its two participants: the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Nationals. It’s not quite the matchup most predicted — only four of 32 FanGraphs predictors pegged the NLCS correctly a week ago — it’s hard to say that either team got there cheaply. The Game 5’s were very different; one was a fantastic blowout, the other a fantastic crushing of Clayton Kershaw’s hopes and dreams, and just like that, the National League’s two winningest teams saw their seasons end before mid-October.

The Washington Nationals were a ZiPS favorite going into their series with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not a literal favorite — the Dodgers were still projected to win 51%-49% — but certainly a team that was hitting above their seasonal win total. Over 162 games, there’s no doubt that the Dodgers were the better club, but over a short series of five games, Washington’s Big Three of Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin match up against any team in baseball. It didn’t always work (see: Corbin’s first relief appearance), but combine the Wild Card and the NLDS, and Nats were able to use that trio in just under two-thirds of their total innings (66.3%). In the regular season, that number was only 40.1%.

Similarly, while the Washington relief corps still isn’t a good unit, they’ve at least been able to use the shorter timeframe of postseason baseball to lop off some of the dreadful performances at the back of their bullpen. Kyle Barraclough and Matt Grace weren’t around to start any late-inning conflagrations (Trevor Rosenthal was mercifully released in August). The bullpen combined for an abysmal 5.68 ERA in 2019, but the seven pitchers brought in this October have combined for a 3.90 ERA. That’s certainly not going to remind anyone of the Yankees, but it’s at least a serviceable group if you’re forced to use them.

In a seven-game series, the Nationals undoubtedly will have to utilize the bullpen more than they did in the NLDS. The two extra games the NLCS can run do not come equipped with an additional day of rest, so it would be even harder to feature a surprise guest appearances from their top starters. Aníbal Sánchez will certainly get another start unless Game 4 is an elimination game for the Nats, and while I wouldn’t count out a Scherzer appearance in a truly high-leverage relief situation, I think you’ll necessarily see Washington rely on its relief pitching more. St. Louis’ offense is not L.A.’s, something that’s not necessarily captured in Win Expectancy calculators, so the average relief outing is slightly less frightening against the Cardinals than an identical game state against the Dodgers. Read the rest of this entry »

The ball left Justin Turner’s bat at 70.3 mph, with a launch angle of 34 degrees. Per Statcast, batted balls with that exit velocity, hit on that plane, have an expected batting average of .550. A little better than a coin flip. There were two out, and nobody on base, and Sean Doolittle on the mound; there were thousands still left at Dodger Stadium willing the ball to fall, thousands more in the empty stadium in Washington praying for it to find a glove. The Washington Nationals had a 99.9% chance of winning the game. And also, Michael A. Taylor, out in centerfield, sprinting toward it — at the last moment, stretching out his glove — the ball, barely missing the ground, centimeters from escaping his glove.

Had the ball fallen, it barely would have made a difference. The Dodgers’ win expectancy would have improved to something like 0.5%. But that’s not what it felt like. Not for the Dodgers fans who had remained through the preceding disaster, looking for a sliver of hope, the slightest graze of cowhide against grass. Not for the Nationals fans, hoping for something they hadn’t yet seen — a glove closed around a ball for a series-clinching out, an end to the years of futility, the beginning of something completely new. This is where the postseason takes you: Years of your life, untold amounts of time and emotional energy spent, seeming to rest in the inches between a ball and a glove and a few blades of grass.

Taylor rose up and took the ball in his glove, a confused expression on his face. Turner, on the basepath 200 feet away, motioned to the dugout. But even as the game hung, for a few moments, in the purgatory of umpire review, the fans knew, and Sean Doolittle knew, jumping off the mound and into the stratosphere, and Adam Eaton knew, leaping in from right field. It was over. The Washington Nationals had won Game 5. They were advancing to the NLCS. And the Dodgers’ historic, 106-win season had ended. They were nine games too short, nine innings too short. A few runs, a few pitches, maybe. A few inches. Sometimes cliches are cliches because they’re true. Read the rest of this entry »

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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