Phil Maton can spin a baseball. His four-seamer averaged 2,563 rpm this season, and his signature curveball was an even-more-rotational 3,154. These weren’t new developments. The 30-year-old Houston Astros reliever has long been known for that attribute, with a July 2017 interview with the then-San Diego Padres rookie having served as its first detailed mention here at FanGraphs.
He’s also had a career-best year. In 68 regular-season appearances out of the Houston bullpen, Maton augmented his 4–3 record and one save with a 3.00 ERA, a 3.74 FIP, 74 strikeouts, and just 49 hits allowed in 66 innings. Moreover, October has once again been his friend. Thanks to a pair of scoreless outings in the ALDS, the righty boasts a 1.04 ERA over 16 career playoff appearances.
Maton revisited the importance of spin and discussed a meaningful change to the movement profile of his fastball when the Astros visited Fenway Park at the end of August.
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David Laurila: Your spin rate was the primary topic when we first spoke six years ago. Now pure spin isn’t considered nearly as important. Do you agree?
Phil Maton: “I think that’s right. Over the years, organizations have figured out that it doesn’t tell the whole picture. There are guys with big breaking balls and hoppy heaters who don’t spin the ball particularly well. That’s where things like spin efficiencies come into play. We’ve identified guys where it’s the entry angle. There are so many different factors in what creates ‘a good pitch.’ Back in 2017, when the spin-rate phase was going on, everyone thought that was the answer. It’s much more complex than that.” Read the rest of this entry »
I’m always a fan of a playoff series that we haven’t seen before, and oddly, the Astros and Rangers have never faced off in the postseason before. But we’ll finally get that battle for Texas supremacy this year in the ALCS, after the Astros shut down the Twins to win in four and the Rangers swept the Orioles and sent them back home for the peak of the steamed crab season. For this championship series, we also get a team without an obvious claim to superiority over the 2023 season, as both tied for the division at 90–72, leading to an unsatisfying Game 163-less conclusion based on head-to-head records.
Houston and Texas having never faced off in the postseason is one of those little accidents of history. The Senators/Rangers took until 1996 to make the playoffs for the very first time, and the Astros only moved to the AL before the 2013 season. Despite playing in the same league, the two franchises haven’t really had their periods of success overlap; 2023 is just the second season in baseball history in which the Astros and Rangers won 90 games in the same season, the only other time being in 1999 (when both teams lost in their respective divisional series). Read the rest of this entry »
You all know how playoff relief pitchers work these days. A starter comes out, perhaps earlier than he would in the regular season, and then the parade starts. A 23-year-old who throws 99 with a mind-bending slider. A former starter who pops 100 with ease. A crafty lefty is next, an embarrassment to his peers thanks to a mere 97-mph radar gun reading. Then it’s time for the big cheese, the bullpen anchor; he throws 100 as well, only with a secondary pitch that would get him convicted of witchcraft in an earlier era.
That’s just the way baseball has gone in recent years. Pitcher training is better than ever and velocity misses bats, so the trend is inexorable. In 2014, the average fastball thrown by a reliever in the playoffs checked in at 94.1 mph. In 2022, it hit 95.9 mph. In the not-so-distant future, it will surely top 96. If you can build the entire bullpen out of fireballers, why not do it?
It feels strange to call Ryan Pressly a junkballer. He sits 94-95 mph with a backspinning four-seamer. He threw a pitch 98 mph this season. He’s lived up near 100 at various points in his 11-year major league career. But in modern baseball, he’s downright quaint, a four-pitch reliever who doesn’t rely on gamebreaking velocity. Read the rest of this entry »
After leading the AL Central for 157 days, sweeping the Blue Jays to win their first playoff series since 2002, and coming into the ALDS with a pair of starters who could go head-to-head just about anyone in the league, Minnesota’s season came to an end on Wednesday night. On paper, the Twins matched up reasonably well with the Astros. They couldn’t match Houston’s overall thunder, but their lefty-packed lineup was a good match for an Astros squad that featured just one left-handed pitcher and whose bullpen fared much worse against lefties in 2023 than it had in ’22. That didn’t turn out to matter much. Over two games at Target Field, the Twins mustered just six hits and three runs, going 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position, and falling short in Game 4, 3–2.
Meanwhile, the Astros are headed to their seventh consecutive League Championship Series, one shy of the record held by the 1990s Atlanta Braves. Despite their dominance on the mound, the scariest thing about the Astros might just be the fact that on Wednesday they showed that they’re capable of winning even on nights when Yordan Alvarez looks mostly human.
For Houston, the question was what to expect from José Urquidy, who was limited by injury to 16 appearances and 10 starts and didn’t look like himself for much of the season. He answered it emphatically, striking out six and allowing just three hits and two earned runs, both of them on solo homers; he earned 19 whiffs, the third-highest total of his career. Urquidy got the Twins to chase four-seamers up, breaking balls down, and changeups that looked tempting before diving down and in off the plate to righties.
For Minnesota, the concern coming into the game was Joe Ryan and his four-seam fastball, a pitch he threw 56.9% of the time this season. That presented a problem; the Astros ran a .372 wOBA against four-seamers this season, with a second-in-baseball 46.8 run value against the pitch (the Braves finished in first with an absurd 73.2). Would Ryan rely more on his splitter and sweeper, or would he be scared away from doing so after watching the Astros sit on and obliterate Sonny Gray’s secondaries one day earlier? The issue turned out to be moot; Rocco Baldelli decided to go with a bullpen game, pulling Ryan after two innings. In a do-or-die affair, the Twins manager told Fox Sports’ Tom Verducci that he was looking to “virtually every guy in our bullpen.”
Those who were able to tune out the sound of old-school baseball men gnashing their teeth and rending their garments witnessed a game in which Baldelli’s plan worked well. Ryan and a cavalcade of Minnesota relievers held the Astros to six hits and kept them under four runs for just the 66th time all season, including the playoffs. The issue was that for just the 54th time all season, the Twins couldn’t push across more than two runs of their own. As was the case all series long, Minnesota’s rookies led the way. Edouard Julien went 2-for-3 with a double, a homer, and a walk, and Royce Lewis walked once and knocked his third home run of the series.
But that one sentence constitutes the entirety of the Minnesota offense. The Twins, who set an all-time record with 1,654 strikeouts during the regular season, struck out 14 times for the second game in a row. Julien’s first-inning double, the only non-homer hit of the night, was promptly erased on a hard luck liner that gave him no real chance to return to the bag in time, making Lewis’ blast off the left field façade a solo shot.
The lead evaporated quickly. Michael Brantley, the second batter in the top of the second inning, got his arms extended on a middle-away Ryan fastball and sent it into the right field stands at 101.8 mph, tying the game at one. Ryan finished his night having thrown just 26 pitches and with a single baserunner allowed in two innings, but he’d been given a lead and let it slip. Between innings, Baldelli came over to Ryan on the bench and shook his hand. From that point, the game belonged to the bullpen.
Urquidy buckled down after the bumpy first inning, facing 16 batters after Lewis’ homer and retiring every single one of them who wasn’t named Edouard Julien. The Twins’ bullpen, though, faltered. After Brock Stewart retired the Astros in order in the third, lefty Caleb Thielbar was given the unenviable task of facing Alvarez, who had homered off him in Game 1, to lead off the fourth inning. After falling behind 1–2, Alvarez reached out and lined a fastball off the plate outside into center for a single. As Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri tweeted, “Limiting Yordan Alvarez to a single at this point feels like recording a strikeout.” Thielbar followed by striking out Kyle Tucker, but he couldn’t handle José Abreu, who went the other way with a monster 424-foot home run off the upper deck in right field.
It was the third homer of the series for Abreu, who ran an 86 wRC+ during the regular season and didn’t hit his first home run until May 28. It was also 3–1 Astros.
Chris Paddack replaced Thielbar, allowing a single to Chas McCormick, then retiring seven straight batters, four by way of strikeout. And in the bottom of the sixth, Minnesota chipped a run back. Urquidy retired Michael A. Taylor on a chopper to third to start the frame, bringing Julien to the plate. He stayed back on a changeup, sending it into the left field bleachers at 100.2 mph and drawing the Twins to within one.
After donning Minnesota’s fishing vest and high-fiving his teammates, he spiked his helmet off the dugout floor. “I was just trying to see a fastball up,” he told Verducci. “He’s got a great fastball and he commands it well. He left the changeup up and I was able to recognize it early and put a good swing on it.”
With a reason to cheer at long last, the Minnesota crowd got back into the game. Jorge Polanco nearly tied things up immediately after Julien’s shot, getting under a high changeup and sending it 339 feet into center field at 100.7 mph for an out. And that was the end of Urquidy’s night; he finished with 5.2 innings, walking one and allowing two runs on three hits.
Urquidy was followed by Hector Neris, Bryan Abreu, and Ryan Pressly, who allowed just one baserunner between them. Minnesota did find some small hope in the eighth, when Baldelli pinch-hit Byron Buxton — only on the roster because a shoulder injury forced Alex Kirilloff off — for Taylor. The crowd understandably went crazy, but Abreu, who hasn’t allowed a run since July 15, induced a harmless popup from Buxton, who hadn’t played at all since August 1. The Twins sent Polanco, Lewis, and Max Kepler to the plate in the ninth; if any of them reached, Carlos Correa would bat representing the winning run. Again the crowd grew frenzied, but for the last time it was disappointed. Correa never got a chance; Pressly stuck Polanco out on a foul tip, struck out Lewis swinging, and struck out Kepler looking.
Baldelli did everything you’d expect a manager running a bullpen game to do. He rode the hot hand when a pitcher looked sharp. He gave relievers clean innings when possible. He saved his most trustworthy arms for the fearsome top of the Houston lineup. He didn’t wait for his offense to tie the game before calling on closer Jhoan Duran in the eighth inning. Aside from a single off the end of Alvarez’s bat and an ill-timed mistake to Abreu, the relief corps delivered; at one point, they retired 13 straight Astros. But Minnesota’s offense just wasn’t enough.
Had anyone other than Julien or Lewis been able to get anything going, had Urquidy betrayed any hint of his previous struggles, had Alvarez not been strong enough to muscle an outside fastball into center, had Polanco’s first-inning liner not led Jeremy Peña directly toward second base to double off the helpless Julien, the two teams might be preparing for Game 4 right now. Instead, thanks to another big night from Abreu, the state of Texas is guaranteed a spot in the World Series. “Now me and Bruce Bochy need to battle,” Dusty Baker said after the game. The ALCS will feature four World Series championships, seven pennants, and 4,276 regular season wins between its two managers. The Twins will have a long offseason with a lot of bright spots and even more what-ifs to to think back on.
After splitting the first two games in Houston, the Astros and Twins faced off in Minneapolis. But after Pablo Lópezshut down the Astros’ bats in Game 2, it was Cristian Javier mowing down a lineup this time around, leading his team to a 2–1 series lead with a 9–1 victory over Sonny Gray and Minnesota.
Javier dominated the Twins for five innings, surrendering just one hit and striking out nine. He was wild at times, walking five and hitting a batter and throwing quite a few waste pitches, especially fastballs. He also wasn’t able to get his slider down as much as he would’ve liked, though that didn’t seem to matter for Twins hitters, who came up empty on 13 of their 16 swings against it. Javier’s gameplan when he was on can best be seen in his three matchups against standout rookie Royce Lewis, whose streak of incredible hits with runners on base came to a screeching halt. Read the rest of this entry »
If the Twins were supposed to be a speed bump on the Astros’ familiar path to the World Series, nobody sent them the message, as they got revenge for Game 1’s 6-4 loss with a convincing 6-2 victory that wasn’t even as close as the score. By winning Sunday, the Twins ensure that we’ll finally have at least one series this postseason that isn’t a sweep as the teams head to Target Field for Game 3.
While nearly everyone on the Twins contributed in Game 2, I don’t think many people will disagree with me when I say that this was Pablo López’s game. While he held the Blue Jays to one run in his Wild Card start, I wouldn’t call that outing a dominating performance. This one was. Against the Astros, a better offense than the Jays, López went seven strong innings, striking out seven and allowing six hits. Bill James’ Game Scores might not be a whiz-bang Statcast measure, but I think they do a great job of giving a general feel of starts from a historical, fan perspective, and López’s Game Score ranks very high among Twins’ postseason outings since the Senators moved to Minnesota:
This was an unfamiliar place to be for the Twins, after snapping a playoff losing streak dating back to 2004 and winning their first postseason series since 2002. Generations of Twins players have gone by without experiencing a playoff win with the team, but the current squad, coming off a two-game sweep of Toronto, was rewarded with a matchup against last year’s World Series champions. But while they had opportunities to break the game open, especially in the early innings, they were unable to fully capitalize, dropping the series opener, 6–4.
Houston starter Justin Verlander threw six scoreless frames, but through his first couple innings, it was an open question as to how long he would remain in the game. He allowed three baserunners in the first, throwing just 10 of 23 pitches for strikes. After walking Edouard Julien and allowing a hard-hit single to Jorge Polanco, he served a fastball right down the middle to Royce Lewis — a scary pitch given Lewis’ string of excellent performances, especially in the Wild Card series. But he swung over the pitch and tapped it to shortstop for the tailor-made double play. Verlander allowed another walk, but he escaped the inning with a groundout.
His second inning went similarly, as he erased singles by Carlos Correa and Ryan Jeffers with another 6-4-3 twin killing, this time off the bat of Michael A. Taylor. Julien doubled to start the third, the sixth Twins baserunner through 10 batters, but he was tagged out in a baserunning blunder. Verlander would allow just two more men to reach over the next four innings. Read the rest of this entry »
After nearly two decades of postseason futility, the Minnesota Twins not only won a playoff game, they advanced to the next round for the first time since 2002. Their reward? Facing the Houston Astros, who have held a firm grip on the American League over the last six years, reaching the ALCS in each of those seasons to go along with two championships and another pair of AL pennants to boot. On paper, this seems like a classic David versus Goliath matchup, but there are key distinctions between the clubs that should make this a very entertaining series:
Team Overview
Overview
Twins
Astros
Edge
Batting (wRC+)
109 (4th in AL)
112 (3rd in AL)
Astros
Fielding (RAA)
-9 (10th)
8 (6th)
Astros
Starting Pitching (FIP-)
88 (2nd)
104 (11th)
Twins
Bullpen (FIP-)
98 (9th)
98 (10th)
Twins
The Twins won a weak AL Central with relative ease thanks to one of the best starting rotations in baseball. That pitching staff is a big reason why they’re not simply the token representative from their division but a real threat to make a deep run into the postseason. They might not have quite the same star power of some of the other contenders in the American League, but there are few holes on their roster and it seems like they’re peaking at the right time. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Sunday in Arizona, Kyle Tucker came to the plate in Game 162 with 29 home runs, one shy of his career high of 30 recorded in both 2021 and ’22. He also had a career-high 30 stolen bases to his name, giving him a chance to become just the second player in Astros history to record a 30–30 season, after Jeff Bagwell, who did so in 1997 and ’99. (To be precise, he’d be the third Astro with a 30–30 season — Carlos Beltrán was dealt to Houston partway through his lone 30–30 campaign in 2004 — but just the second to reach those marks in a full season in an Astros uniform.) Tucker would join four others — Ronald Acuña Jr., Francisco Lindor, Julio Rodriguez, and Bobby Witt Jr. — in the 30-30 club this season, which would have been the biggest cohort of 30–30ers in a single year in big league history. In a game where there was a division title at stake, he had a shot to add some metaphorical hardware to his personal trophy case as well.
In the fifth inning, Tucker, well, touched ‘em all:
He struck a line drive into right field, where Arizona’s Jake McCarthy misjudged it with a few steps inward, allowing it to sail over his head. Tucker got on his horse, coasted into third, and appeared to pick up on some lackadaisical defensive effort on Arizona’s part, at which point he took off for home. He was there before the back end of the Diamondbacks’ relay could realize it was happening and do anything about it. Read the rest of this entry »
Extremes in defense were on display as the Wild Card round kicked off on Tuesday afternoon. In the Rangers-Rays opener, Texas left fielder Evan Carter laid out for a great catch of an Isaac Paredes line drive in the first inning, starter Jordan Montgomery dove to make an impressive snag of Jose Siri’s popped-up bunt in the second, and Josh Jung made a nice grab on Manuel Margot’s soft liner in the seventh. On the other side, Siri’s day from hell continued as he missed catching Corey Seager’s wall-banging double in the fifth, then deflected and briefly lost control of a Seager bloop before airmailing it over third base in the sixth, costing the Rays a run. And misery loves company — his Rays teammates made three additional errors in their 4-0 loss.
