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:

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.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, center fielder Michael A. Taylor made a pair of exceptional catches, and Carlos Correa saved a run in the fourth by fielding a dribbler that had gone under third baseman Jorge Polanco’s glove, making a sidearm throw home while on the run to keep Bo Bichette from scoring. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

If Houston has a problem, that notion was put on hold for at least one night. Having lost four straight three-game series, three to lousy teams, the Astros arrived in Seattle sporting just a half-game lead over the Mariners for the third AL Wild Card spot, 2.5 games behind the Rangers. Fortunately for the Astros — for whom quality starting pitching has suddenly been in short supply this month — Justin Verlander played the stopper, shutting out the Mariners on two hits over his first eight innings in a 5-1 win.

Facing a team that owns the majors’ second-highest wOBA against four-seamers (.377), the 40-year-old Verlander dialed down his fastball usage in favor of his curve, and retired the Mariners in order in seven of his innings. He struck out the side in the second and fourth innings, and got into trouble only in the third, when Dominic Canzone and Josh Rojas hit back-to-back singles and J.P. Crawford followed with a walk. Verlander escaped that jam by inducing Julio Rodríguez to ground into a double play.

By that point, the Astros led 4-0, having banged out three second-inning runs against Luis Castillo via a trio of hard-hit balls from Mauricio Dubón, Martín Maldonado, and Jose Altuve, with Yordan Alvarez adding a fourth-inning homer. From the double-play ball through the end of the eighth, Verlander retired 16 straight Mariners. Given the intact shutout and a pitch count of just 91, manager Dusty Baker sent him out to start the ninth, but Rojas’ double into the right field corner ended Verlander’s night, and Bryan Abreu closed things out, though Rojas came around to score. Verlander struck out eight, benefited from a pair of diving stops by first baseman José Abreu, and allowed just six hard-hit balls out of 18 in play, none of them barrels. Read the rest of this entry »

Hao-Yu Lee will be one of eight Detroit Tigers prospects participating in the forthcoming Arizona Fall League, and while he doesn’t possess the highest profile of the bunch, he does have the most-traveled backstory. Acquired from the Philadelphia Phillies at the trade deadline in exchange for Michael Lorenzen, the 20-year-old infielder hails from Taiwan and began dreaming of playing professionally in the United States at age 16 after a strong performance in a U-18 tournament, in Korea. Two years earlier he’d excelled in a tournament that took place 15-plus miles southwest of Comerica Park.

The Phillies signed Hao-Yu in June 2021—the Cincinnati Reds and Tampa Bay Rays were among the other MLB teams that had expressed interest — once he’d finished high school. No. 8 on our Phillies Top Prospects list with a 40+ FV coming into this season, he slashed .273/.362/.399 before going on the shelf with a quad strain in mid-August. He ended up playing in just eight games for the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps before missing the duration of the campaign.

The first big-league game Hao-Yu attended was in 2017 when he was competing in the Junior League World Series, which is held annually in Taylor, Michigan. He doesn’t remember if the Tigers won that day, but he does recall his first impression of Comerica Park. “I told my teammates that I was going to play here someday,” the confident youngster said of the experience.

He also remembers the tournament, and for good reason. Not only did Taoyuan, Taiwan capture the international bracket, they went on to beat Kennett Square, Pennsylvania in the finals. Moreover, Hao-Yu “raked that tournament; five games, five homers!” Read the rest of this entry »

J.P. France is a late-bloomer proving the skeptics wrong. Selected in the 14th round of the 2018 draft by the Houston Astros, the right-hander not only made his big league debut in April at age 28, he’s performed admirably since doing so. In 22 starts plus one relief appearance, France is 11-5 with a 3.84 ERA over 131-and-a-third innings. Moreover, he’s put up those numbers with a skill set that’s unusual in today’s game. His fastball ranks in the 34th percentile for velocity, his groundball rate is in the 51st percentile, and his 17.% strikeout rate is among the lowest for qualified pitchers.

France, who graduated from Tulane University with a degree in Homeland Security before finishing up his college career at Mississippi State University, sat down to discuss his unique profile, and the underdog attitude that comes with it, when the Astros visited Fenway Park at the end of August.

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David Laurila: You went from a later-round pick to the starting rotation on a contending team. How did that happen?

J.P France: “First, it’s been a grind. I think the COVID year was probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It gave my arm basically a full year of rest, and it also gave me time to truly focus on mechanics: how to clean up my motion, how to simplify it. I think that would have happened eventually, but I don’t think it would have happened as quickly. I was able to literally just focus on what was I feeling, and what I was fixing, as opposed to having to go out there and compete and possibly be working on something else at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Beforetimes, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via the Team Entropy series. With last year’s introduction of an expanded and restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball did away with the potential for scheduling mayhem in favor of a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and of the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB also eliminated all winner-take-all regular-season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Games 163 and no more potential Bucky Dents. Instead, ties, even for spots where the winner would receive a postseason berth and the loser would go home, are decided by mathematics. It’s enough to make a fan want to shout, “Hey, Manfred, pull your head out of a spreadsheet and watch an elimination game!”

The untangling of the often-chaotic scenarios by which those one-game tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre. But particularly with so many close races, there’s still enough untangling to do in potentially complex tie scenarios that I’ve chosen to continue a version of this exercise, pouring out a cold one for what might have been. If what we’re left with isn’t exactly chaotic, you can thumb your nose at the commissioner as you take a seat on the Team Un-Tropy bandwagon. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Sparks had a solid playing career. The now Houston Astros broadcaster debuted with the Milwaukee Brewers two months before his 30th birthday, in 1995, and went on to toss butterflies in the big leagues through 2004. His best season came with the Detroit Tigers in 2001 when he logged 14 wins and posted a 3.65 ERA over 232 innings.

Sandwiched between the knuckleballer’s stints in Beer City and Motown were a pair of seasons in Anaheim, where his teammates included Orlando Palmeiro. According to Sparks, the left-handed-hitting outfielder wasn’t always a left-handed-hitting outfielder.

“He was originally a right-handed second baseman, but he broke his arm,” the pitcher-turned-broadcaster explained prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “He was ambidextrous to begin with, so he started playing the outfield throwing left-handed, and that’s how he remained. I played with Orlando, but he never told me that. Joe Maddon was a minor league field coordinator with the Angels, and he’s the one who told me.”

Sparks proceeded to point out that Palmeiro made the final out of the 2005 World Series against the Chicago White Sox while playing for the Astros.

Meanwhile, an outfielder whose best big-league seasons came with the Boston Red Sox played with Sparks on the rookie-level Helena Brewers in 1987. Read the rest of this entry »