Ethan Salas is one of baseball’s top prospects. Currently playing for the Arizona Fall League’s Peoria Javelinas, the left-handed-hitting catcher is not only No. 7 on The Board, he won’t turn 19 until next summer. Signed as an international free agent out of Venezuela by the San Diego Padres in January 2023, Salas is both precociously talented and mature beyond his years.
He is also still figuring things out. The 6-foot-2, 205-pound backstop was refreshingly candid on that front when I spoke to him on my recent visit to the AFL. More advanced defensively than he is with the bat — a scouting assessment he agrees with — Salas readily admits that there areas in which he needs to improve.
“I would say more consistency on game management stuff would be the biggest one right now,” said Salas, who has caught only 870 professional innings. “Calling pitches, situations in the game, seeing things before they happen, how to prevent big innings. I need to be more efficient in those areas.”
Salas’s physical attributes are undeniably plus, which brings us to an interesting aspect of how he operates behind the dish. It came to the fore when I asked if he is one-knee-down or more traditional in his setup. Read the rest of this entry »
What a game. This series has been so hyped that a scoreless tie through four innings felt like a letdown. But then the party got started. In the end, we got everything we wanted: stars, steals, defensive gems and gaffes, and even a walk-off home run to evoke Kirk Gibson. But my beat is writing about managerial decisions, so let’s get a quick 1,100 or so words in on that before it’s time for Game 2. Specifically, I’m interested in the bottom half of the 10th inning in Game 1 of the World Series, and the decisions that led to Freddie Freeman’s colossal walk-off grand slam and lifted the Dodgers to a 6-3 win over the Yankees.
Using Nestor
Hated it. The pitch for why it’s a bad decision is pretty easy, right? Nestor Cortes hadn’t pitched in a month, a trusted lefty reliever was also warm, and the scariest possible guy was due up. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this was the lowest-risk move. There’s not much I can say about the pitch-level data, because he threw only two pitches, but there are myriad reasons to opt for a reliever over a starter in that situation.
A lot of Cortes’s brilliance is in his variety. He throws a ton of different pitches. He has a funky windup – several funky windups, in fact. He changes speeds and locations. That’s how a guy who sits 91-92 mph with his fastball keeps succeeding in the big leagues. But many of those advantages are blunted when you don’t have feel for the game. Read the rest of this entry »
LOS ANGELES — The injured star meandered to the plate. Bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the 10th inning, down a run in the first game of the World Series. It all happened so fast. A first-pitch fastball fired inside, elevated, square in the lefty happy zone. A short, powerful swing beat it to the spot. A towering line drive sliced through the chilly Southern California air, the crowd silent in awe and disbelief for a beat. Then pandemonium, earth-shaking stomps, elated feral screams pierced the air.
In an instant classic, Freddie Freeman, playing through an injured ankle, channeled the iconic Kirk Gibson home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, pounding a first-pitch heater into the right field bleachers for a walk-off grand slam to hand the Dodgers a 6-3 win over the Yankees in Game 1 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium.
“Those are the kind of things, when you’re 5 years old with your two older brothers and you’re playing wiffle ball in the backyard, those are the scenarios you dream about, two outs, bases loaded in a World Series game,” Freeman said. “For it to actually happen and get a home run and walk it off to give us a 1-0 lead, that’s as good as it gets right there.”
The 10th inning was a saga unto itself, a seesaw affair in which New York’s win probability swung from 90% to 0% in the span of a few minutes. It looked like the story of the game would be Los Angeles closer Blake Treinen and his inability or refusal to prevent stolen bases; Jazz Chisholm Jr. singled, stole second and third, and scored on a groundball to short to hand the Yankees a 3-2 lead.
After exhausting all of their preferred arms in the first nine innings, the Yankees were left to rely on Jake Cousins to try and close it out. Cousins retired the first hitter he saw before walking Gavin Lux and giving up a single to Tommy Edman.
That forced Yankees manager Aaron Boone’s hand. He didn’t want Cousins, a right-hander, to take on Shohei Ohtani, so he sought out the platoon advantage by bringing in Nestor Cortes, who was making his first appearance in over a month after dealing with a balky elbow. One pitch later, and Boone was looking like a genius — Ohtani put an awkward swing on a middle-middle heater, and left fielder Alex Verdugo sacrificed his body to corral the foul pop, lunging over the barrier along the line and front-flipping after securing the catch. Because Verdugo left the field of play after making the grab, both runners advanced; with two outs, and still seeking the platoon advantage, Boone intentionally walked Mookie Betts to bring up Freeman.
Cortes was not so lucky on his second pitch. He fired a fastball with 21 inches of induced vertical break; it was well-placed horizontally, hitting the inside corner, but not so much vertically. It hung up right where Freeman could mash it. Because the pitch was located inside, it allowed for a perfectly pulled fly ball, rocked at 109-mph and at a 30-degree launch angle. It was a true no-doubt dinger. Freeman triumphantly lifted his bat milliseconds after contact, aware he’d just delivered a legendary moment.
“It’s arguably one of the – might be the greatest baseball moment I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve witnessed some great ones,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Until then, it looked like Giancarlo Stanton had been the one to deliver the legendary moment. In the top of the sixth inning, the titanic slugger walloped a Jack Flaherty curveball 116.7-mph to the pull side for a go-ahead two-run dinger, handing the Yankees a 2-1 lead with their top bullpen guys lined up to shut the door. But the Dodgers knotted it up in the bottom of the eighth, linking an Ohtani double with a Betts sac fly to level the score at two.
Things got weird in the top of the ninth, when Gleyber Torres rocked a Michael Kopech fastball deep into left field. A Dodgers fan, unbelievably, reached over the left field wall, snagging the liner before it could complete its journey. The umpires ruled it a fan-interference double, and Torres was stranded at second, setting up the extra inning dramatics that followed.
Before that wild finish, the game was largely defined by the two starting pitchers: Flaherty and Gerrit Cole. They both turned in excellent performances, slicing through hitters and keeping their teams within striking distance.
Flaherty’s NLCS flipped between brilliant and shambolic, leading to questions about how he might equip himself in this series opener. In Game 1 against the Mets, Flaherty threw seven brilliant shutout innings, lending an exhausted Dodgers bullpen some much-needed rest. But in Game 5, Flaherty did not have his best stuff. The Mets lit him up for eight runs over just three innings as the Dodgers effectively punted the game.
As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello tweeted before the game, Flaherty’s performance likely would hinge on his fastball velocity. When Flaherty sits above 93 mph, the expected damage is low and the pitch gets a ton of whiffs. But when it averages 91.4 mph, as it did in his start in Game 5 of the NLCS, it is liable to get hit around.
Petriello proved prophetic: Flaherty’s fastball averaged 93.6 mph, topping out at 96, and the fastball did damage, notching 10 called strikes and a 38% CSW (called-strike-and-whiff percentage). But the knuckle-curve was the real weapon — the Yankees swung at it 17 times and came up empty on 12 of them. Unfortunately for Flaherty, one of those swings was that Stanton two-run homer. He finished with 5 1/3 innings pitched, six strikeouts, one walk, and two earned runs.
Cole might have been even better. Across six-plus innings, the Yankees ace allowed one run on four hits and no walks, and for the fourth time this postseason, he struck out exactly four batters. He flipped his tactics midway through the start, deploying a fastball-heavy approach the first time through the order and emphasizing his softer stuff on successive encounters with the Dodgers lineup. Through two innings, Cole had thrown 70% fastballs.
Navigating through the lineup for a second time, Cole switched up his approach. He went cutter/changeup/cutter to start off his second Ohtani at-bat; Ohtani secured the early edge, bringing the count to 2-1. Cole got back into the count with a cheeky sinker; even though it was located middle-middle, Ohtani could only manage a foul ball, perhaps fooled by the unexpected movement. Cole, sticking with his newfound soft stuff approach, buried a curve on 2-2 to punch out Ohtani.
To Freeman in the bottom of the fourth, Cole continued the assault; he got ahead with two consecutive cutters, breaking Freeman’s bat on a foul ball on the second of the offerings. Ahead once again, Cole jammed Freeman with a 98-mph four-seamer up and in; Freeman shattered his bat again, shoving the pitch to the pull side for a 47-mph exit velocity groundout.
The Dodgers scored the game’s first run off Cole in the bottom of the fifth. With one out, Enrique Hernández drove a heater down the right field line; Juan Soto overran the ball, allowing Hernández to reach third with a triple. It was the Dodgers’ second hit of the game and their second triple, after Freeman — of all people — tripled down the third base line with two outs in the first inning despite his barking ankle. On a 1-1 count, Will Smith lifted a low-and-outside cutter to Soto into relatively shallow right field. Soto caught it a bit awkwardly but produced a strong and accurate throw home; Hernández slid in head first, just ahead of the tag.
As the top of the sixth began, Roberts faced his first difficult decision of the game — let the locked-in Flaherty take on Soto and Judge for a third time, or opt for one of the flamethrowers in the bullpen. Going against the conventional wisdom, Roberts stuck with his horse — and it backfired. Boone made the same decision, and the outcome went his way. The third-time-through-the-order debates would be settled another day.
With Cole finally out in the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers immediately threatened to tie the game. Clay Holmes started Max Muncy out with a sinker at his boots for ball one; the next pitch, a slider, was too far up, giving Muncy the 2-0 edge. On the third pitch, Holmes overcooked a backfoot sweeper, nipping Muncy’s toe and giving the Dodgers runners on first and second with no outs. Enrique Hernández laid down a bunt, giving up an out to move the runners into scoring position.
Even with a slight Yankees lead, FanGraphs live win probabilities gave the Dodgers a 54.3% chance of winning after Hernández’s bunt. That probability sunk to 37.3% after Smith popped up the first pitch he saw. That was the end of the line for Holmes; Tommy Kahnle, he of 47 consecutive changeups, came in to handle Lux. In the highest leverage at-bat of the first nine innings, Lux rolled over on a — surprise! — changeup, stranding the runners at second and third.
Kahnle stayed in to face Edman to lead off the eighth. He threw four changeups to Edman, who rolled over to short. Ohtani smashed Kahnle’s 56th consecutive changeup 113.9 mph, roping it off the center field wall for a double. Ohtani’s speed forced a hurried throw from Soto; it came up about three feet short, and Torres tried to pick it, but it deflected off his glove. He was unable to locate it right away, and by the time he did, Ohtani had scooted to third with just one out. Boone pushed the closer button, bringing in Luke Weaver to take on Betts and Freeman.
Weaver snuck ahead of Betts, working a 1-2 count, but Betts smoked a changeup to center. For a second, it looked like Judge wouldn’t be able to get to it, but he scampered back just in time, preventing the extra-base hit but catching it with no chance to stop Ohtani from scoring from third on the sac fly. After eight full innings, the game was knotted at two.
In the ninth, things got weird. Torres crushed a 99-mph up-and-in fastball to the very top of the wall for that fan-interference double. Then, Roberts intentionally walked Soto and pulled Kopech; Trienen came in to take on Judge with runners on first and second and two outs.
Treinen unleashed some typical wizardry, whipping two sweepers in the zone to gain the 0-2 edge; Judge ultimately skied a fastball about 200 feet in the air to end the threat.
Weaver took the middle of the Dodgers order in the bottom of the ninth. Teoscar Hernández lined out to Soto in right, and Muncy popped out to short for the second out. Then, Enrique Hernández shattered his bat on a duck snort liner; it looked like it might drop, but Verdugo made a nice sliding catch to retire him and end the inning. This game was going extras.
Trienen picked up right where he left off to start the 10th, dispatching Stanton on some filth. But he left a sinker over the plate to Chisholm, and the third baseman pounced, smacking it past Lux for his second single of the game; he nabbed second a 2-0 pitch to Anthony Rizzo. Pitching coach Mark Prior strolled deliberately to the mound.
After Chisholm took third with no throw, Volpe on a 1-1 count squared around to bunt — but missed. On 1-2, he hit a ground ball up the middle. Edman fielded, and looked like he might have a shot to turn two, but the ball got stuck in the webbing of his glove. Edman got Rizzo at second but Volpe beat the relay to first, staying out of the double play and allowing Chisholm to score the go-ahead run.
With New York’s main leverage arms expended, Boone went to his own sweeper wizard, Cousins, to try and close out the first game of the World Series. He started strong, inducing a Smith fly ball for the first out. But he fell behind Lux, ultimately walking him on a high fastball. Cousins did not mess around against the NLCS MVP Edman, but he couldn’t put the shortstop away, either. Edman laid off an 0-2 slider, then pushed a groundball single up the middle on the 1-2 pitch. Lux likely would have advanced to third, but he hesitated and then tripped rounding second base; he had to scurry back to the bag. The Yankees had two lefties, Cortes and Tim Hill, warming in the bullpen; after Edman reached, Boone went to Cortes, who had last pitched over a month ago.
The rest, we can be sure, will go down in history.
Rihanna said it best. Or maybe it was Russell Crowe. This is the main event. The top seed in the American League meets the top seed in the National League. The presumptive AL MVP is leading his team against the presumptive NL winner. Those guys, coincidentally, are the two biggest free agents in history – Shohei Ohtani broke the bank this past offseason, only a year after Aaron Judge signed a historic deal of his own. Juan Soto might eclipse them both this winter. And while those three are the biggest stars in the game right now, they have three previous MVP winners – Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Giancarlo Stanton – as sidekicks. Oh yeah, and the two highest-paid pitchers in history are the aces of their respective teams. Heck, I’ve allowed this paragraph to run to a ridiculous length, and I’m only now mentioning 2024 Home Run Derby winner Teoscar Hernández.
By any objective measure, this World Series matchup is absolutely loaded with star power. But the current players are only half the story. This is the 12th Yankees-Dodgers matchup in World Series history – the Dodgers have played in 22 of these things, and they’ve faced one team more than half the time. This isn’t quite Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Fall Classic anymore, where the two preeminent teams are a subway ride apart, but the next best thing is a rivalry between the two biggest cities in the country.
Want an example of how good the players in this series are? Here are the top five hitters in baseball by wRC+ this year:
Jay Jaffe dove into how rare it is to see the best player in each league in the World Series – turns out, it’s quite rare! Fifty-homer sluggers have also never faced each other in the Series before now, and that leaves out the fact that Ohtani stole 50 bags too. Soto is an absurdly over-qualified second banana. Betts isn’t on this list, and he was in the MVP running before missing time with injury. The star power on display is simply staggering, as Davy Andrews noted Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I published the first half of my votes for this year’s Fielding Bible awards, which have now been released. This morning, I’m going to cover my ballots for the three outfield positions, pitchers, multi-positional defenders, and defensive player of the year. If you’re curious about the methodology I used, you can read all about it in yesterday’s article, but here’s a bite-sized refresher:
I used a weighted blend of DRS, FRV, DRP, and UZR (the four flagship public defensive metrics), with the weights based on how well each metric did at each position when it comes to reliability and consistency. I used different weightings based on recent effectiveness at a few position groupings: first base, non-first-base infield, catcher, and outfield. That gave me an initial rough order. From there, I used my own expertise, both in terms of deeper statistical dives on individual players and the copious amounts of baseball I watched this year, to assemble my final rankings. I deferred to advanced metrics when the gaps were huge – Patrick Bailey is the best defensive catcher by a mile, for example – but for close calls, I leaned heavily on my own judgment.
That’s the broad strokes of how I built a method for analysis, which is hopefully at least somewhat interesting. More interesting than that? The actual players who played the defense and got the awards. So let’s get right to my last six ballots. The award winners are noted with an asterisk after their name in the balloting section
I thought that Cowser and Greene were the two easy choices for this award. They both played elite defense, with every metric above average and a few elite markers. (Greene was the best left fielder by DRS, Cowser by FRV.) They both exemplify what I’m looking for in a left fielder – namely, someone good enough that their team keeps playing them in center. In fact, if either were much better defensively, they might not qualify for this award; you have to play the plurality of your innings at a position to qualify, and they both played hundreds of innings in center. Read the rest of this entry »
You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.
That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.
Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better. Read the rest of this entry »
Pitching! Everyone’s concerned with pitching this postseason, and for good reason. Pitchers are always getting hurt. They don’t throw as many innings as they used to. Even good teams, rich teams like the Mets and Dodgers, are throwing de facto bullpen games deep in the playoffs. And leaving a starting pitcher in past his 18th hitter risks invoking the wrath of the dreaded third-time-through-the-order penalty.
Remember Tanner Bibee? He’s a really good starting pitcher; he had a 3.47 ERA in 31 starts for the Guardians this year. In Game 5 of the ALCS, two trips through the Yankees order got Bibee five scoreless innings. But when manager Stephen Vogt brought Bibee out for a sixth, it was like he’d ordered a punt on fourth-and-short from inside the opponent’s 40-yard line. And sure enough, Bibee allowed three hits to his last four opponents, the last of them a game-tying home run. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Blaze-Imagn Images and Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
Beyond offering the rare clash between number one seeds, this year’s World Series matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees is steeped in baseball history and — as anyone who’s read me over the past two and a half decades knows — is of great personal resonance. The last time the two teams met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, I was an 11-year-old baseball nut hoping his favorite team could avenge its back-to-back World Series losses from ’77 and ’78. I could never have imagined that I’d get to cover their next October matchup. For most of the country, this pairing’s biggest selling point beyond the top-seed aspect and the involvement of the sport’s two most storied franchises is the presence of the game’s two biggest stars. Both the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge are coming off historic seasons that will likely net them MVP awards, though things haven’t come quite so easily for either of them in the postseason.
We won’t officially know until November whether Judge and Ohtani both won the awards, but even working from the assumption that they will, this is hardly the first time that two likely MVPs have squared off in the World Series. In fact, it’s happened 25 times since 1931, with four such pairings from among the 11 times the Yankees and Dodgers have met. That said, it’s just the second such meeting since the start of the Wild Card era (1995 onward) and the sixth since the start of the Division era (1969 onward). MVP choices may be driven less by team success these days, but even when they are, the expanded playoff field makes getting to the World Series much harder:
I’m trying out a new format for our managerial report cards this postseason. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series is so short. This year, I’m sticking to the highlights, and grading only the managers who survived until at least their League Championship series. Today, let’s talk about the first of that quartet to be eliminated: Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians.
My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.
I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but David Fry and Kerry Carpenter were also great this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Juan Soto is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Sunday night’s NLCS Game 6 offered quite a contrast in its starting pitcher matchup. With a chance to push the series to a decisive Game 7, the Mets started Sean Manaea, a 32-year-old lefty who made a full complement of 32 starts during the regular season, set a career high for innings pitched (181 2/3), and had already made three strong postseason starts, allowing five runs across 17 innings. On the other side, with an opportunity to close out the series and claim their fourth pennant in eight seasons, the Dodgers tabbed Michael Kopech, a 28-year-old righty who started 27 games last year but hadn’t done so once this year, instead pitching out of the bullpen 67 times in the regular season and four more in the playoffs. The unorthodox choice owed to the Dodgers’ injury-wracked rotation. Los Angeles has barely been able to muster three workable starters for October, let alone four, and so manager Dave Roberts has resorted to sprinkling in bullpen games, with mixed results.
The ballgame turned out to be a mismatch, but not in the way you might have imagined. Kopech struggled with his control, throwing just 12 strikes out of his 25 pitches, walking two, and allowing one hit and one run. If he set a tone for the rest of the Dodgers staff, it was that this was going to be a grind, the outcome hinging on their ability to navigate out of traffic — which they did, stranding 13 runners while yielding “only” five runs. Meanwhile Manaea, who had limited the Dodgers to two hits and two earned runs over five innings in NLCS Game 2, lasted just two-plus innings and was battered for six hits while walking two. He was charged with five runs, four of which came off the bat of Tommy Edman in the form of a two-run double in the first inning and a two-run homer in the third.
The Dodgers weren’t expecting Kopech to go any deeper, leaving Roberts to follow a script that allowed him to utilize his remaining relievers to best effect (such as it was). The Mets harbored hopes that Manaea could at least pitch into the middle innings so that manager Carlos Mendoza could avoid deploying some of their lesser relievers, but the starter faltered so early that they didn’t have that luxury. As it was, the fifth run charged to Manaea scored when Phil Maton, already carrying an 8.44 ERA this October, was summoned with no outs in the third and didn’t escape before serving up a two-run homer to Will Smith. Faced with a 6-1 deficit, the Mets refused to go quietly, but went down just the same in a 10-5 loss that included 14 pitchers combining to allow 22 hits and 12 walks. It was excruciating viewing, and with a pennant on the line, one couldn’t help but wish instead for starters battling deep into the game. Alas, this was hardly atypical October baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
