The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 800 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of money flowed ahead of this week’s unofficial lockout deadline, but not all of the moves involved swimming pools of cash. Among the many made were some low-key bullpen additions, usually by contenders, all of which arguably upgraded their respective bullpens. Let’s talk about some of the more interesting ones!

Michael Lorenzen to the Angels

Lorenzen signed a one-year, $6.75 million contract to head to Anaheim, a surprisingly juicy figure for a pitcher with an ERA well in excess of five for the Reds in 2021. As you may have guessed, his peripheral numbers were better. A FIP just over four isn’t going to evoke prime Craig Kimbrel, but it’s a good bit better than the rest of the disasters in Cincy’s bullpen. The drop in strikeout rate was scary, but ZiPS doesn’t think it’s real when looking at the Statcast data, estimating that you ought to have expected him to finish up with 12 more strikeouts than he actually racked up — an impressive number in only 29 innings. Among relievers, that was the second-largest negative deficit, behind only Keynan Middleton of the Mariners. Scouting can also pick up this sort of thing, which is likely one reason the Angels were so willing to drop this amount of money.

The other is that Lorenzen wants to explore being a two-way player more than he got to in recent years. The Angels are apparently happy to grant this wish, given they’re the home of arguably the best (simultaneous) two-way player ever in Shohei Ohtani.

RHP Michael Lorenzen not only wants a shot at being a starting pitcher in 2022, but also wants the opportunity to get regular at-bats as an outfielder. Wants to get on the Ohtani routine. The Rangers, Pirates, Cubs and Giants are all believed to have inquired.

— Joe Doyle (@JoeDoyleMiLB) November 28, 2021

Lorenzen’s .233/.282/.429 line doesn’t scream “spare outfielder,” but one has to remember that his at-bats have been widely scattered, hampering his offensive development. In addition, a healthy chunk of them came as a pinch-hitter, a role in which players hit considerably worse compared to games they start.
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After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below. We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central, as well as the AL East and the NL West. Today, we’re looking at the AL West.

Houston Astros (95–67)

The Big Question
Could the Astros bounce back from a surprisingly disappointing season and do so while almost playing the heel as fans returned to the park? Despite being awash in offensive talent, this was easier said than done due to the possible lack of pitching depth; any team would have had a difficult time replacing the starters that have left since the team’s 2015 breakout. Even ignoring the smaller losses like Dallas Keuchel or Brad Peacock, making good on the departures of Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton, as well as the de facto one by Justin Verlander, was an extremely tall order. Further complicating efforts was that Forrest Whitley, Houston’s top pitching prospect, required Tommy John surgery in March.

How It Went
As with the Nationals, Dusty Baker continued to be the perfect manager at the right time for the Astros. Sometimes you want a Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, but sometimes it’s 10 degrees outside and you have a burst pipe in your house, and you need a highly-skilled craftsman rather than a transcendent artist. And honestly, Dusty showed a bit of the Florentine in 2021, managing a young pitching rotation of raw talent quite well and adjusting when Lance McCullers Jr. was injured in the playoffs. Coupled with Zack Greinke showing signs of decline and suffering a late-season neck injury, it was a technical challenge for him to balance the roster, and he did pretty well. He didn’t earn his first managerial World Series ring (he has one as a player with the 1982 Dodgers), but I think you can make a case that this season was his finest hour.

The sign-stealing controversy, meanwhile, didn’t magically go away, but it didn’t seem to faze the Astros at all. They played just fine on the road in the regular season and playoffs, showing little sign that the derision of the crowds had any effect. On the contrary, the offense roared back to pre-2020 levels, Jose Altuve demonstrated he was far from done, and Carlos Correa had his healthiest season in a long time. With the lineup rocking the house, the pitching staff just had to avoid being terrible to make the Astros one of the AL West favorites. They did far better than that. One raw arm, Framber Valdez, officially shed the “raw” descriptor by building on 2020’s improvements. Another, Luis Garcia, is one of the favorites to win the AL Rookie of the Year award (he would have been mine). Cristian Javier isn’t polished yet, but he performed well in various roles, and when he could locate his slider, it was scary.

What’s Next?
There’s still a lot of work to do. Correa is much harder to replace in-house than George Springer was. Greinke may be in his decline phase, but he also gave the Astros 171 good innings in 2021, something that is hard to replace. That’s doubly so if it turns out that McCullers’ injury does end up costing him time in 2022. The team does have some payroll room to work with — a little more if Aledmys Díaz or Rafael Montero are non-tendered — and the highly encouraging 2021 cameo from Jeremy Peña after returning from injury helps the shortstop situation. As solid a success as 2021 was in the pitching department, the team would be well-served to aggressively go get more this winter.

Player Projection Spotlight: Kyle Tucker

A ZiPS favorite for a long time — it had him pegged as a league-average outfielder as early as 2018 — Tucker built on his 2020 season, hitting .294/.359/.557 and finishing with just under 5 WAR. His solid plate discipline improved in the best way, as he became even more aggressive at swinging at pitches in the strike zone without suffering contact issues or reduced power. Only two players in the top 10 for zone swing percentage were also better-than-average at avoiding swings at out-of-zone pitches: Tucker and Freddie Freeman. Derek Fisher didn’t become a thing in Houston, but Tucker and Yordan Alvarez are building blocks for this franchise.

Seattle Mariners (90–72)

The Big Question
Did the Mariners have enough pieces they could put together to challenge the top of the division? Seattle’s roster looked a bit like one of those baskets from Chopped: a lot of intrigue, but it wasn’t obvious how the whole thing would work together without ending up as a nice frosty bowl of cod liver ice cream for dessert. The right side of the infield looked particularly problematic, with Evan White and Shed Long Jr. having miserable 2020s, but these were two players who required playing time, not 33-year-old journeymen you could simply replace without risking losing future contributions.

How It Went
It went pretty well, actually. A big assist came from the run differential, but considering this looked like a team that should have been happy to finish with a .500 record, Seattle has to be pleased with the final standings. Not ecstatic, as the M’s were eliminated from the playoff picture after losing two of three to the Angels in the final weekend, but the year ought to be considered a success. But neither White nor Long answered questions about them positively, and 2020 Rookie of the Year Kyle Lewis was done after May due to a knee injury.

Luckily for them, the Mariners received enough pleasant surprises elsewhere to make up for it. Mitch Haniger hit just as well as he did before his long string of injuries, and Chris Flexen’s solid season will likely have even more teams looking to Korea for rotation help.

What’s Next?
The Mariners won 90 games rather than the 76 implied by their run differential, and while mean statheads aren’t taking those off the scoreboard, there’s literally almost no correlation in baseball history for teams outperforming run differential one season and then doing it the following year. The magic didn’t carry over in 2019 or ’10, and it’s unlikely it’ll do so in ’22.

Another troubling thing is that Seattle’s success in 2022 was derived mainly from older players. In addition to the young players mentioned above, Jarred Kelenic struggled in his debut, Taylor Trammell lost his starting job in a month, and Justus Sheffield struggled with injuries and command. Logan Gilbert was solid, but he was an exception. Paradoxically, though, that gives Seattle some additional upside here. Most of those players are young enough to turn things around, so the Mariners could easily draw their flush with some breakouts that help compensate for a more normal Pythagorean record. Helping matters is that it looks like president of baseball ops Jerry Dipoto appears to have the ability to add payroll this winter.

Player Projection Spotlight: Jarred Kelenic

I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t have some worries about Kelenic, but they ought to be milder than his performance in the majors suggests. Where you should really panic are those cases when a player fails to hit in the majors and then goes back and continues to struggle against minor league pitching. That wasn’t the case for him; he hit pretty well for Tacoma, and when you combine his major league line and minor league translation, ZiPS sees his 2021 as a .215/.293/.403 line. That’s not good, mind you, but it’s less of a disaster, and similar to his translation from 2019 of .226/.281/.411.

It’s troubling if Kelenic’s not better at 21 than at 19, but he’s still very young, and the loss of the 2020 season prevented him from going through trials by fire as he moved up the ladder, each rung featuring pitchers more able to adjust to hitters than the one before. I still think Seattle made a mistake not getting him playing time that year.

Oakland Athletics (86–76)

The Big Question
Could the A’s continue to find enough free or cheap talent to remain relevant given the thinning out of their farm system? After ranking in the middle of the pack prospect-wise entering the 2019 season, they steadily dropped in the rankings over the next two seasons. By 2021, they had sunk to 28th, ahead of just the Rockies and Nationals. And that wasn’t solely due to graduations to Oakland’s roster, which were basically just Jesús Luzardo and Sean Murphy. Coming off a year in which there was no minor league season, which made it trickier to string the fishing pole with waiver wire than usual, some good news on this front would be a pretty big deal.

How It Went
The results here were mixed. Luzardo, rather than developing into the ace the team hoped for, struggled with his command far more than in 2020, and by the end of the season, the Lizard King was a Marlin, traded for Starling Marte. But Sean Manaea was healthy and effective, as was James Kaprielian. The cobbling together of the roster mostly worked yet again, from Cole Irvin being picked up very cheaply and being a solid innings-eater to a lineup that hardly disappointed, except for Matt Chapman (at least offensively). Less successful was the bullpen, which combined for just 1.5 WAR, better than only a single Oakland relief corps over the last two decades. As such, the A’s were that rare team that actually saw their use of relievers drop relative to recent seasons while the four-inning and five-inning specials became more common league-wide.

What’s Next?
It’s likely that another round of cost-cutting is about to wallop Oakland. The A’s already let Bob Melvin, manager for the last 11 seasons, go to the Padres without any compensation just months after extending his deal for another year. That saved them $4 million, and unless they change their philosophy, there’s likely to be more soon. Manaea and Chris Bassitt, keys to the rotation this year, are both entering their final year of salary arbitration, and Chapman, Matt Olson, and Frankie Montas are all free agents after 2023. These are a lot of losses to replace simply by being clever with underappreciated Triple-A talent; the Rays do this, but their farm system churning out pitcher after pitcher has been key to them punching above their weight in the AL East.

Without replacing anyone they’re losing this year or have already lost, the A’s already have to make significant cuts to the payroll to get them back down to last year’s payroll. No sense in not playing pauper now, I guess, before they’ve squeezed a fancy new stadium out of the city to replace WhateverIt’sCalledThisYear Coliseum.

Player Projection Spotlight: Matt Chapman

A .210/.314/.403 line is decidedly unimpressive, but the good thing about Chapman is that his glove is so good that to be a drag, his offense has to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. The A’s may have to be satisfied with a rebound that features a low batting average, as his drop-off in play isn’t fueled by a freakishly low BABIP. His contact numbers really have gotten worse, as he’s become far more vulnerable to breaking pitches than he used to be. The dropoff across the board in exit velocity is a concern, but ZiPS still sees Chapman as young enough that this isn’t fatal — yet.

Los Angeles Angels (77–85)

The Big Question
Could the Angels build some semblance of an adequate team around Mike Trout? That’s been the question for the last decade, but one they need to answer affirmatively given how valuable their franchise player has been. That they haven’t done so successfully — they last made the playoffs in 2014 and last had a winning record in ’15 — is an organizational disaster; all they’ve gotten from the peak of the best player they’ve ever had is an ALDS sweep and a parade of bland 75–80 win seasons.

How It Went
Like the reboot of a movie franchise, the old superstar was injured, but a new superstar rose from his ashes in Shohei Ohtani. Now, he’s been a contributor before, but this was the first season we got to see that glittering promise of what happens if a player is a full-time star pitcher and a full-time star hitter simultaneously. Babe Ruth did both, but consecutively rather than at the same time, and Wes Ferrell only received scattered playing time when he wasn’t pitching. And yet the Angels once again generally stunk around their big star.

What’s Next?
The challenge remains the same. Now, the Angels can hope to have both Ohtani and Trout on the roster for the entire 2022 season, but even both of them might not be enough given the roster around them. Adding another six wins to the 2021 squad doesn’t get the Angels to the playoffs, and you can’t expect that kind of magical season to be Ohtani’s baseline, so a few of those wins, at least, are coming back off the tally. Meanwhile, Trout turned 30 in August and is no longer as durable as he once was.

If the Angels — or more accurately, ownership — have any sense, they will be among the most prominent players for free-agent talent this winter. The Albert Pujols contract is no longer available as an excuse, and Justin Upton’s $28 million disappears from the books in another year. After Trout and Anthony Rendon (also someone who is hopefully healthier for 2022), there are no gigantic long-term commitments once Upton is gone, aside from the obvious need to extend Ohtani, unsigned past 2023. Los Angeles has some good secondary talent on the offense, but there are a lot of needs on the pitching side of the equation. Steamer only sees two average starting pitchers and a thin bullpen, and while ZiPS isn’t official yet, it’s not any more optimistic (and arguably is even less so). It’s an exciting challenge for GM Perry Minasian, but only if he’s given free rein by owner Arte Moreno.

Player Projection Spotlight: David Fletcher

Fletcher has never been a star, but he’s a lot of fun as a throwback to an older style of hitter — no power, high contact — that is seen far less often in the modern game. After all, who wants to lose a fantastic term like “punch and judy” to the aether? He remained as good at connecting with the ball as he usually was, but he perhaps took it too a little too far in 2021. In the past, he had been very selective at the plate, but he started swinging at a lot more pitches of all types this year. Unfortunately, the decline in his discriminating taste largely led to worse outcomes when he actually hit the ball. Nobody would confuse Fletcher’s power with Javier Báez’s, but his average exit velocity of 82.3 mph was below that of the average pitcher at the plate (83.2).

In the end, Fletcher lost 44 points of isolated power from 2020 and saw his walk rate cut nearly in half, and that was not compensated with comparable increases in batting average. I’m actually more optimistic than ZiPS is here, as I see his 2021 issues stemming not from a lack of ability but from leveraging that ability in a way that utilizes it to the fullest. You can fix an approach better than you can fix a lack of talent.

Texas Rangers (60–102)

The Big Question
Unfortunately, the biggest question for the Rangers — just how long a full-scale rebuild would have to be — was one that could not possibly have been answered in 2021. Their attempted quick retool to coincide with the opening of the new stadium failed miserably, resulting in the need to start from scratch. And with the cupboard nearly empty of major league talent and a farm system that was still only middle of the pack, Texas’ goal in 2021 was simply to remain moderately interesting for the fans as the front office addressed some serious long-term problems.

How It Went
Texas assembled a reasonably competent bullpen, but one made up of journeymen and veterans rather than the farm paying out dividends. Neither Jordan Lyles nor Mike Foltynewicz showed enough life to fetch a return in a trade this summer, but Texas was able to turn Kyle Gibson into Spencer Howard once the Phillies grew desperate for pitching. Adolis García filled the fun side of the equation by hitting 31 homers and driving in 90 runs, but he’s already older than Joey Gallo, rather one-dimensional, and more likely to fill Renato Núñez’s role with the Orioles a few years ago rather than be someone who is one the roster three or four years from now. Nathaniel Lowe showed life at times, but not so much that he’s obviously the long-term answer at first base. Willie Calhoun still hasn’t shown he can actually hit in the majors, and Nick Solak remained as inconsistent as he was in 2020.

What’s Next?
The biggest concern about the Rangers — and the same one that has hindered Baltimore’s rebuild — is how few answers they got about their young hitting. No position players on the major league roster took the type of step forward to make you say, “OK, now that is a franchise guy.” Outside of Josh Jung, Yohel Pozo, and Justin Foscue, there are scant few hitters in the system I feel better about now than I did in March. That doesn’t mean the rebuild is a failure, but it means that the Rangers still are very, very early in that sorting-out process; little so far has stuck to the wall. At this point, Texas needs to hoard young talent like it was premium toilet paper in March 2020 and hope for the best.

Player Projection Spotlight: Dane Dunning

It wasn’t quite the season for Dunning that Texas hoped for after his triumphant return from Tommy John surgery for the White Sox in 2020. He missed time due to injury, but at least it was an ankle problem this time around rather than a scarier elbow or shoulder issue. ZiPS sees him as a good bit better than his 2021 ERA and doesn’t think that he “earned” his poor .338 BABIP based on his play-by-play data.

The next step is to stay healthy for 150 innings or so, which would be good news for a franchise that has suffered from a woeful lack of it lately. I think the key for Dunning to take the next step is better consistency from his changeup; his sinker is impressive, but it’s more the vertical type rather than one with the notable fade of Morton’s or Blake Treinen’s, and it could be a consistent tool against lefties. Please, no sinker versus two-seamer wars in the comments!

It’s time for another edition of postseason managerial grades. If this article series has taught me anything, it’s that in-game management is both hard and largely inconsequential. There are a million variables to consider in nearly every at-bat, but at the end of the day, the players on the field win or lose the game. Dusty Baker, the subject of today’s article, is proof of that: the Astros are an excellent team, and Baker managed well, and the Braves just beat them. The team didn’t choke, and neither did he. They simply ran into someone playing better, which is almost always more important than who moves the chess pieces around more efficiently.

One piece of feedback that I’ve gotten in previous installments of this series is that giving managers all the credit or blame for their decisions understates the role that team front offices have in preparing for the playoffs. Managers aren’t making it up as they go along, at least not always; they come into each game with a plan for many contingencies. In most cases, that’s a plan they’ve constructed in collaboration with front office personnel who do the drudge work of coming up with 50 (or 100 or 200) scenarios that mostly won’t take place, then coming up with plans for each.

So if you’d like, consider these as joint manager and front office grades. The two are operating in concert, with the front office doing research that the manager applies during games. So this is a Dusty Baker report card, but it’s also a referendum on everyone in the Astros’ front office for getting the right information in front of him. And spoiler: they all passed with flying colors.
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When Freddie Freeman clutched the throw from Dansby Swanson to secure the final out of this year’s World Series, the 2021 Braves instantly matched the total number of championships won by the franchise from 1991-99, a span during which a core laden with future Hall of Famers won five pennants but lost four World Series. That this year’s Cinderella team stands with that dynasty — yes, I’m using that word to describe even a non-contiguous run — in total championships is a reminder of one of current third base coach Ron Washington’s famous catchphrases: “That’s the way baseball go.”

Indeed, the game does not always distribute its rewards evenly or justly, and sometimes the player or team that’s streaking or simply lucky is the one that wins, particularly in a short series, where injuries and hot hands can have a disproportionate effect. Suffice it to say that if NLCS MVP Eddie Rosario were a true-talent .383/.456/.617 hitter, he would not have been available at the trade deadline in exchange for a sack of Pablo Sandoval’s laundry.

This is not intended to slight the Braves, who were clearly a better team than their full-season .547 winning percentage — lower among World Series winners than all but the 2014 Giants (.543), 2000 Yankees (.540), 1987 Twins (.525), and 2006 Cardinals (.516) — indicated. From the point of the trade deadline, when they were 51-54 (.486) but had reassembled their outfield on the fly with Rosario, Adam Duvall, Joc Pederson, and future World Series MVP Jorge Soler, they went 37-19 (.661), outplaying every team in the majors but the white-hot Dodgers (.772) and Giants (.729). In the postseason, they knocked off the 95-win Brewers, 106-win Dodgers, and 95-win Astros by going a combined 11-5 and never facing an elimination game themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

There will be no Game 7 this year. We’ve only had two in the last five World Series, so it’s far from a safe assumption. I attended a pair of them during my time with the Astros, including the last World Series (and Houston) game I went to, just over two years ago: Game 7 in 2019. It was a miserable experience at the time, and only exacerbated by the things to come, both publicly and privately. At the same time, the last two minutes of the game reinforced my love of baseball.

The World Series is incredibly stressful for teams, and that stress is magnified greatly by the time one reaches the finale. Between exhibition games, the regular season, and the playoffs, teams are approaching their 200th game of the year, and with all of that, it still comes down to nine innings. Win the game, and your team is part of history. Lose, and you are little more than the answer to a trivia question.

The stress of the day is overwhelming, and it feels like game time will never arrive. My wife, who had been traveling with me since Game 3, decided to drag me away from my nervous energy by finding an afternoon movie to help distract from the importance of the evening to come and pass the time before we headed to the ballpark. She suggested something popular on the indie film scene at the time: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

If you know the film, you are likely already laughing at the thought of it serving as a stress reliever. While it is quite excellent, it’s a claustrophobic, incessant doomfest about a pair of lighthouse workers, isolated during a storm, as they spiral into insanity, or maybe just more into insanity, given that they arrived there already well on their way.

Beyond striking visuals and a pair of incredible performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, what stands out most about The Lighthouse is the sound design, which is among the most memorable I can think of. Sound plays a massive role in the film; the music and ambient noise are constant and always foreboding, but the most iconic sound from the film is a frequent foghorn (as heard in the beginning of that trailer) that acts as an indicator of things ramping up. That foghorn stays with you, and it still enters my headspace at times of high stress.

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The Atlanta Braves ended the 2021 season with a bang on Tuesday night, crushing the Houston Astros in a seven-run rout that rarely felt even as close as the eventual score. Atlanta had failed to make the World Series in any of their last 12 playoff appearances since being swept by the Yankees in 1999. But as they always say, the 13th time’s the charm, and the Braves took home the big trophy in front of a disappointed Minute Maid crowd.

The post-Milwaukee period was a tough one for the Braves, as they spent most of the 1970s and 80s fighting with Cleveland and San Diego for the unofficial title of the league’s most moribund franchise. They were more or less a Ted Turner-driven sideshow that existed to fill up hours on TBS between reruns of Alice and The Andy Griffith Show. They hit it big in the worst-to-first 1991 season, and even with a lengthy rebuilding phase in the mid-2010s, they’ve won the second-most games in baseball since the start of that season, behind only the New York Yankees. Despite impressive feats like dominating the top of the NL East for over a decade, one thing always marred their legacy: the lack of World Series victories. For all their dominance — the Braves won 100 games on four occasions in the 1990s and had chances at two more if not for the 1994 strike — they only emerged with a single World Series win in 1995.

It’s not entirely fair to count World Series titles in light of baseball’s greatly expanded modern playoffs, but life is rarely known for playing fair. The team that won Game 6 in 2021 is a very different one from that which won Game 6 in 1995. These Braves were not a dominating team, but rather one that wasn’t a heavy favorite to win the division and lost their franchise player, Ronald Acuña Jr., halfway through the season with a torn ACL. The 1995 team had Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in their primes. This one had to throw two consecutive bullpen games in the World Series because the broken leg Charlie Morton suffered in Game 1 reduced them to a two-man rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

“Doing the little things right” is an overused cliché in baseball. In its yearning for sacrifice bunts, productive outs, and pitching to contact, it’s one that doesn’t typically go well with the analytical thinking common to this website. But there’s still no better characterization for what Martín Maldonado did in the fifth inning of Game 5 than that very cliché. He did the little things right; in fact, what he did was rather ingenious.

In the early portion of Sunday night’s back-and-forth affair, the Astros erased a four-run deficit but found themselves behind yet again after Freddie Freeman went yard in the bottom of the third. Just two innings later, though, they would take the lead for good. Their half of the fifth went like this: A single by Carlos Correa, a strikeout of Yordan Alvarez, a single by Yuli Gurriel, and then a groundout by Kyle Tucker. With two outs, that left runners on second and third for Alex Bregman, who had been moved down in the order as a result of recent struggles. A.J. Minter and the Braves wanted no part of him nonetheless, not with Maldonado on deck; he seemed like the best matchup by far.

Even in retrospect, the Braves would clearly make the same move again. Maldonado is a career .212/.290/.348 hitter, and over 426 plate appearances with the Astros this season, all three legs of the slash were even worse than that: .172/.272/.300. This postseason, he’s been invisible offensively: .114/.184/.114. Put simply, he is not a threat at the plate. But in the highest-leverage moment of a World Series elimination game, he came through. With the bases now loaded after the intentional free pass, Maldonado walked. Read the rest of this entry »

“Fortune favors the brave(s).”

Matt Damon uses something like this phrase to punctuate an ill-conceived cryptocurrency commercial that has been running during the World Series, the copy for which includes more polysyllabic words (that aren’t “Domino’s” or “America”) than most ads. To this point, the commercial had provided an eerie narration of the Series itself. Atlanta had been the team improvising (Dylan Lee opening Game 4) and experimenting (Ozzie Albies hitting right-on-right), sometimes out of necessity (Game 5 starter Tucker Davidson), and it was Atlanta that entered Sunday night with a commanding 3-1 series lead before leaping out to a 4-0 lead in Game 5. But with their backs against the wall, the iron-jawed Astros withstood a first-inning grand slam and battled back to win 9-5, sending the series back to Houston.

The game began with tremendous good fortune for Atlanta. In the first, Albies was treated to a shift-aided, room service double play ball off the bat of Carlos Correa that erased a Michael Brantley walk and ushered Davidson past what was likely a jittery inning of work. In the bottom half of the frame, the topspin of a chopper off the bat of Jorge Soler made the ball’s hop shallow, allowing it to slip underneath the glove of Alex Bregman, who expected the hop to be bigger. That gave the Braves a meaningful extra out to work with, and instead of an Albies groundout ending the would-be five-pitch inning for Houston starter Framber Valdez, Austin Riley and Eddie Rosario were able to prolong the first with a single and walk before Adam Duvall delivered a huge blow in the form of a wall-scraping, opposite-field grand slam. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you have to let Dylan Lee pitch. Lee wasn’t supposed to be part of Atlanta’s plans for the playoffs. He wasn’t supposed to be part of Atlanta’s plans for the year, period: the Marlins released him just before the start of this season, and the Braves picked him up and stashed him in Triple-A for depth. He was added to the NLCS roster to replace Huascar Ynoa (Lee was on the NLDS roster but didn’t pitch), then tabbed to start tonight’s game as an opener.

Sometimes, you have to give Kyle Wright bulk innings. After Lee let three of the first four Astros reach base, Wright came into the game, no doubt earlier than Brian Snitker had intended. He wriggled out of the jam with only a single run in, getting Carlos Correa on a grounder before striking Kyle Tucker out to end the threat.

Like Lee, Wright wasn’t part of Atlanta’s playoff plans. He wasn’t on the NLDS or NLCS roster, and he threw only six innings in the big leagues this year. With Ynoa out, the Braves wanted someone to get them bulk innings, and Wright made 24 starts in the minors this season; he figured to be a mop-up guy who could handle bulk innings in case of emergency.

Like Lee, Wright struggled to tame a deep Houston lineup. He’s a sinker-first, sinker-second pitcher, and the Astros eat minor league sinker-ballers for lunch. The Astros swung at 17 sinkers; they missed exactly once. Of the 22 Astros he faced, eight reached base. Jose Altuve socked a home run. Houston had at least two runners on base in four of the first five innings.
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