Ronald Acuña Jr. unlocked a new offensive gear this year. He already had speed and power — he was only three stolen bases short of a 40/40 season in 2019, his first full season in the majors. That wasn’t an option this year, what with a 60-game slate, but what he did do is even more impressive: he started walking.

Acuña’s 18.8% walk rate was the fourth-highest in the major leagues. He drew walks at a higher rate than Carlos Santana, Joey Votto, and Mike Trout. This wasn’t some intentional walk mirage, either; it’s not often a great idea to walk the man batting in front of Freddie Freeman, and Acuña drew only two freebies all year. Instead, he came by it the regular way: he’s such a fearsome hitter that pitchers avoided the strike zone, and he started laying off more pitches that missed their mark.

That’s easier said than done — otherwise every hitter would be doing it. Acuña managed it, though. He didn’t do it magically; rather, he cut back on his swing rate everywhere. He swung less at pitches over the heart of the plate, and thinking “swing less often” let him cut back in every other region:

This newfound equilibrium presented a conundrum for opposing pitchers. Stay out of the zone, and you’re liable to put a stolen base threat on with Freeman batting next. Get too familiar, and you might get acquainted with Acuña’s 99th percentile hard hit rate. It’s a puzzle with no good answers.

Last year, Acuña had another wrinkle to his plate discipline game: he swung more than anyone else on 3-0. It was just another thing to think about: think of 3-0 as an automatic strike with the batter taking, and you were throwing batting practice to one of the best hitters in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Dodgers announced on Tuesday that, as a result of back spasms, left-handed veteran Clayton Kershaw will not make his scheduled start against the Atlanta Braves in Game 2 of the NLCS; rookie Tony Gonsolin will take his place on the mound opposite Braves rookie Ian Anderson.

The 32-year-old three-time Cy Young Award winner has battled back problems since 2016, hitting the Injured List with a back-related ailment on four separate occasions, the most recent of which was just earlier this season, when Kershaw was similarly scratched from his Opening Day start just hours before first pitch. He didn’t make his first appearance of the season until August 2, but did not miss a start after that.

Clearly, the hope for the Dodgers is that Kershaw will make a faster recovery this time, ideally in time to make a start later this series. Last year, the Washington Nationals were dealt a similar blow when Max Scherzer needed to be scratched after waking up before his scheduled World Series Game 5 start with severe neck spasms; Scherzer was able to start Game 7 three days later.

Kershaw looked sharp in his first two postseason starts, allowing just three runs across 14 innings against the Brewers and Padres, striking out 19 and walking just one. Those came after a regular season in which the left-hander looked the best he had in years, turning in a 2.16 ERA and 3.31 FIP in 58.1 innings with his best strikeout-to-walk ratio (7.75) since 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

For much of Monday night’s Braves-Dodgers clash, the Dodgers seemed to be on the defensive. When the ninth inning began, the score was knotted at one (spoilers!). It was tied not because both teams were equal in the scorebook, but rather because the Braves had failed repeatedly to cash in on their chances.

Through eight innings, Atlanta left 10 runners on base to Los Angeles’ five. In the fourth, they put two aboard with consecutive one-out walks against Walker Buehler, who struggled with his control all night. Two on, one out: these are the situations that can make or break a start, and Buehler skated out of trouble by retiring Nick Markakis and Austin Riley.

In the sixth, the Braves knocked again. Travis d’Arnaud and Ozzie Albies led off the inning with singles, chasing Buehler from the game. Brusdar Graterol came in with no one out and precious little margin for error. When he escaped without damage — in six overpowering pitches, no less — he and Buehler exulted in it:

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Update: The Dodgers announced their NLCS roster this morning, adding Alex Wood and Edwin Ríos and dropping Gavin Lux and Terrance Gore. This gives Los Angeles 15 pitchers for this round. Ríos is still recovering from his groin injury and could be limited to pinch-hitting duties to start the series. The Braves did not make any changes to their roster.

The Atlanta Braves have cruised through the 2020 postseason, sweeping the Reds and the Marlins in the Wild Card and Division Series, respectively. Their pitching staff has pitched four shutouts and allowed a total of just five runs to score in five playoff games. But their two early round opponents were beneficiaries of the expanded playoff format and might not have reflected the normal strength of the playoff teams from years past. In the National League Championship Series, they’ll finally meet their match against a powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers team built to win a World Series.

Despite plenty of recent success, this will be Atlanta’s first appearance in the NLCS since 2001 when they lost to the eventual World Series champion Diamondbacks; they’ve made the playoffs 10 times since. For the Dodgers, this will be their fourth appearance in the NLCS in the last five seasons and their seventh since 2001. Agonizingly, they don’t have a championship to show for all their success in reaching the semi-finals; their last World Series win was in 1988.

Like the Braves, the Dodgers blew through the first two rounds of the playoffs, sweeping both the Brewers and Padres. San Diego was a much stronger opponent for Los Angeles than Miami was for Atlanta. Still, we shouldn’t hold the quality of the past opponents against either team. This series pits the number one seed in the NL against the number two seed. Both of these teams earned their chance to claim the league championship with excellent play all season long.

Both clubs possess a dynamic offense. The Dodgers 122 wRC+ was tied for the best in baseball this year, while the Braves’ 121 was third. They were neck-and-neck as far as runs scored, too, with Los Angeles leading baseball with 349 runs and Atlanta a single run behind them. They were the top two teams in baseball in home runs, slugging, Barrel%, and Hard Hit%. But while both teams can score runs at will, their lineups are built a little differently. Both squads have a handful of stars anchoring their offense, but the Dodgers’ lineup is longer and deeper. There will be no respite for Braves pitchers when facing the seven, eight, and nine hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves finished sweeping the Miami Marlins on Thursday afternoon, issuing a 7-0 shellacking to knock the Fish out of the postseason. After holding Cincinnati’s bats firmly in check in two Wild Card games, the Braves’ bats exploded in Games 1 and 3, with a generally ineffective Miami lineup struggling to keep up.
Coming into the 2020 season, one of the big question marks surrounding the Marlins was just how effective they’d actually be at scoring runs. In 2019, the team finished last in the National League in runs scored, nearly half a run per game behind the 14th-place San Diego Padres. The Marlins added some veteran depth to the lineup in the form of Jesús Aguilar, Jonathan Villar, Corey Dickerson, and Matt Joyce last offseason — which feels like it was about five years ago at this point — and the hope was that with the team’s impressive stable of young pitching improving, they’d score just enough runs to become relevant. With an assist from a 16-team playoff format, that’s exactly what happened; the offense managed to support a generally solid rotation, and the weak bullpen (5.65 FIP) didn’t sink the team enough to drop it below .500.

That blueprint worked against the Cubs and their 10th-ranked offense and thanks to Sandy Alcantara and Sixto Sánchez, seven runs in two games still left Miami with significant room to spare. But shutting out the Braves is a trickier proposition and when Atlanta’s run-scoring machine ramped up, the Marlins failed to match it, leading them to be the first team eliminated from the round of eight. Read the rest of this entry »

This time there wasn’t much offense. On the heels of a Game 1 that finished 9-5, the Atlanta Braves took a commanding two-games-to-none lead in the NLDS by pushing past the Miami Marlins by a score of 2-0. Ian Anderson and four relievers combined for the shutout, with a pair of solo home runs providing just enough run-support for a suddenly-stellar pitching staff.

What scoring there was came early. Dansby Swanson took Pablo López deep in the second inning with what was his second home run in his last two at-bats. In Game 1, the 26-year-old shortstop — given name James Dansby Swanson — had homered his final time up to cap a six-run Atlanta seventh.

Travis d’Arnaud, who’d preceded Swanson’s Game 1 blast with one of his own, then went yard against López in the fourth. Seven plate appearances into the NLDS, 31-year-old backstop — given name Travis E. d’Arnaud — now had a single, a double, and a pair of walks to go along with his two dingers.

Anderson wasn’t giving up anything. A suddenly-feeble Marlins lineup managed just three hits off him in five-and-two thirds innings — a near copy-cat of his no-runs-on-two-hits, six-inning performance last week in the Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

By and large, today’s NLDS Game 1 between the Braves and Marlins followed a predictable script. Atlanta came in having lost just once all year with Max Fried on the mound, and while the southpaw wasn’t sharp, he held the fort long enough for his homer-happy teammates to take control. Rallying behind long balls by Travis d’Arnaud and Dansby Swanson — and buoyed by the usual strong bullpen effort — the Braves prevailed by a score of 9-5.

The top of the first didn’t portend what was to follow. Fried’s first inning comprised just 11 pitches — it would have been eight had third baseman Austin Riley not committed a two-out throwing error — and all of them were strikes. A repeat of last week’s pitch-efficient, cruise-control effort versus the Cincinnati Reds looked to be in the works.

Looks can be deceiving, though Miami’s starter didn’t exactly string together goose eggs either. Two pitches into Sandy Alcantara’s outing, Atlanta led 1-0. Reminding everyone that he’s one of baseball’s best players, Ronald Acuña Jr. deposited an outside fastball into the right-field seats at Houston’s Minute Maid Park. (Hello bubble.) The tale of the tape was 428, the bat flip was just juicy enough, and Alcantara was anything but happy. Read the rest of this entry »

If Major League Baseball awarded MVP honors for the Wild Card Series, then Max Fried, Ian Anderson and the rest of a Braves pitching staff that held the Reds scoreless for 22 consecutive innings would have rightly claimed it, but Freddie Freeman played a significant role in the Braves’ advancement as well. In the bottom of the 13th inning of Game 1, more than four and a half hours into a scoreless standoff that set a postseason record, the 31-year-old first baseman’s single up the middle brought home Cristian Pache, his latest big hit in a season that for all of its brevity has been full of them.

Since the ballots have been cast, that hit won’t affect the voting, of course, but Freeman’s regular season performance has given him a shot at becoming the first first baseman to win an MVP award since Joey Votto in 2010. His performance was all the more amazing given that he tested positive for COVID-19 in early July, and feared for his own life as he battled high fevers. Thankfully, he not only recovered and regained his strength but did so in time to be in the Braves’ lineup on Opening Day. Remarkably, he played in all 60 games, one of 14 players to do so (not counting Starling Marte, who squeezed in 61 while being traded from the Diamondbacks to the Marlins). Freeman hit a sizzling .341/.462/.640, placing second in the National League in all three slash stats and wRC+ (187) behind Juan Soto, who played 13 fewer games due to his own COVID-19 battle.

Big hits? Freeman batted .423/.583/.885 in 72 plate appearances with runners in scoring position, good for a major league-best 264 wRC+ in that capacity. While he finished second in the NL behind teammate Marcell Ozuna in RBI (56 to 53), he led the majors in Win Probability Added (3.17), more than a full win ahead of the 10th-ranked Ozuna. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League East was stacked this year. The Braves were one of the best teams in the NL last year, the Nationals won the World Series, the Mets have talent, and the Phillies signed Zack Wheeler during the offseason. It’s no surprise, then, that two NL East teams are meeting in the NLDS. The Braves were again one of the best teams in the National League, and the Marlins… wait, sorry, the Marlins?!?

This preview isn’t a rehash of Miami’s remarkable regular season campaign. It’s about the five games that will be played to determine a spot in the NLCS. Both of these teams will come into the series rested and ready, at least to the extent that anyone is rested and ready at this point in the year. That doesn’t mean the regular season performance of both teams doesn’t matter, though, because it provides a window into both how these clubs are built and who is likely to win.

The Braves are built around a dynamic offense. Freddie Freeman is a leading candidate for NL MVP, and he may not even be the best hitter on his own team; Ronald Acuña Jr. has a solid claim to that crown. Acuña took a step forward this season, and he was already one of the brightest stars in the game. He added plate discipline and power, walking a career-high 18.8% of the time and clobbering 14 homers in just 202 plate appearances.

We’d be talking more about Acuña’s season if it weren’t for Freeman, who took his normal controlled aggression to a new level. He walked more often than he struck out for the first time in his career, batted a video-game-on-easy-mode .341/.462/.640, and had the underlying batted-ball metrics to back it up; a career-high barrel rate and hard hit rate were backed by a ludicrous 31.1% line drive rate. His 187 wRC+ was second only to Juan Soto’s 200 mark across all of baseball.

Behind Freeman and Acuña, the Braves have yet more pop. Marcell Ozuna is having a bounce-back season after two years of middling numbers for the Cardinals. Ozzie Albies is more than just a favorable contract; he’s also a solid hitter with above-average defense. Travis d’Arnaud, a castoff only a a year ago, hit a BABIP-aided .321/.386/.533 this year. Maybe you can’t count on d’Arnaud to keep that up, but the rest of the lineup — Austin Riley, Adam Duvall, Dansby Swanson, and even Nick Markakis — provides admirable depth to go along with the headliners.

The job of stopping the dynamic Atlanta offense will fall to a precocious Marlins pitching staff. Sixto Sánchez would be my choice for NL Rookie of the Year if I had a vote; he made only seven starts, but he immediately looked like he belonged. His four-seam fastball averaged 99 mph, a remarkable number for a starter even in velocity-mad 2020. His changeup and sinker were excellent as well; they combined to prevent opposing hitters from putting anything in the air, a key part of his phenomenal 0.69 HR/9 rate.

After Sánchez, Sandy Alcantara and Pablo López will both certainly make starts. Alcantara took a step forward this year after some inconsistent performances in 2018 and 2019. He set a career high in strikeout rate (excluding an 8.1 inning stint with the Cardinals in 2017), a career low in walk rate, a career high in groundball rate, and career lows in FIP, xFIP, and SIERA. Alcantara has always lived off of his fastball, and he’s throwing his sinker more than ever this year to good effect.

López is a clear third in the hierarchy at the moment, but he too gets a ton of grounders while still missing bats — his 24.6% strikeout rate this year doesn’t look like a fluke, as he got more chases and missed more bats than any of his previous major league seasons. After López, it gets dicey — Daniel Castano will probably make a start, and both José Ureña and Trevor Rogers are acceptable fifth starters.

Those starters would be well served to go deep into games, because Miami’s bullpen was abysmal this year. They looked excellent in two games against the Cubs, but Brandon Kintzler, Brad Boxberger, and friends were terrible on the year as a whole, and Braves batters hit .315/.395/.589 against them in 10 meetings this year, good for an 8.69 ERA and 6.65 FIP. The less the Marlins have to rely on their ‘pen, the better.

On balance, Atlanta has the edge when they’re batting. Their powerful lineup doesn’t need to win against Miami’s rotation, merely fight them to a draw and get to the bullpen. Most of the time, the playoffs would allow a more focused bullpen, minus the chaff, which might make Miami’s weakness less glaring. In their case, however, the entire bullpen is made up of chaff — only Yimi García pitched 15 or more innings with an above average xFIP or strikeout rate.

If the Marlins want to win, then, they’ll need to do it with generous contributions on the offensive side of the ball. This season, that production has come mainly from Miguel Rojas, Brian Anderson, and Garrett Cooper. Rojas, a glove-first shortstop who had never displayed much power before, cracked 10 doubles, a triple, and four homers in only 143 PA. Nothing in his batted ball data backs up the breakout, however, and even the Marlins don’t seem to believe it — he has batted seventh and eighth in their two playoff games.

Anderson, on the other hand, looks like the real deal. For a third straight season, he put up solid offensive numbers in relative obscurity. His only real shortcoming this year was a troubling uptick in swinging strike rate that ballooned his strikeout total, but he made up for it with more barrels and more power in general.

Cooper has flown under the radar in Miami, but he’s looked like a diamond in the rough this year; a bruising righty slugger who hits too many balls on the ground but makes up for it by spraying those grounders and making the most out of the balls he does hit in the air. He’s one of the rare hitters in baseball who doesn’t suffer against breaking balls; he does far more damage on contact against bendy stuff. That could pose a problem for any pitchers who like to spot in-zone breaking balls as a way to get ahead in the count.

Miami has some other hitters capable of hurting the Braves. Jesús Aguilar can still take mistakes out of the park and just posted the lowest strikeout rate of his career, albeit in only 216 PA. Matt Joyce still hits righties. Jon Berti provides league-average hitting and wow-he’s-fast speed. Corey Dickerson is a member of the Marlins.

One key question for Miami’s offense remains unanswered: what will become of Starling Marte? Marte was the team’s big deadline acquisition, likely the best offensive player on the team. He suffered a fractured pinkie when Dan Winkler hit him on the hand in Game 1 of the Wild Card series, and his availability is as of yet unknown. The Marlins played Magneuris Sierra in center field to replace Marte, a tough blow for an offense that was already short on difference-makers.

Atlanta has dealt with injury issues of their own; Mike Soroka and Cole Hamels, two of their top three starters, are both out for the year. Even pickled pepper picker Philip Pfeifer, a pitching prospect who was expected to be depth in case of injury, is out. That leaves Max Fried and Ian Anderson as the last two impact starters, with some combination of Kyle Wright, Huascar Ynoa, and maybe even Fried on three days’ rest to fill out the rest of the rotation.

The Braves didn’t allow a single run in their two games against the Reds, and while Fried and Anderson won’t get to pitch in every game of the NLDS, the bullpen will. Atlanta’s bullpen was excellent this year; Mark Melancon and Chris Martin led the way for a deep unit. Tyler Matzek, A.J. Minter, Shane Greene, and even Josh Tomlin all had excellent seasons. Will Smith was abysmal, but anyone can be abysmal in 16 innings — he struck out 29% of opposing batters but was victimized by a brutal 33.3% HR/FB; a full third of the fly balls he surrendered left the yard, and that probably won’t continue.

If the Braves are hoping to fight to a standstill against Marlins starters and then thrive against the bullpen, Miami needs to thread a trickier needle. They’ll be at a disadvantage against the high-octane parts of the Atlanta bullpen, and if Fried and Anderson are in late-season form, that’s no great shakes either. The latter part of the starting rotation is the best place to strike, but — curse you, math — it won’t come into play in the first two games of the series.

I’m not exactly going out on a limb here by saying that the Braves are heavily favored in this series. ZiPS sees Atlanta as 76.8% to win the series, about as lopsided as a five-game series can get. The Marlins have never lost a postseason series, as you might have heard once or 50 times during last week’s broadcasts, but they’ll need to pull off an upset against an opponent far more formidable than the Cubs to keep that streak going.

It’s well-chronicled that the Twins have now lost 18 consecutive postseason games. What it isn’t is well-explained, and that’s for good reason. A streak this torturous is inexplicable. Getting swept in a short series is by no means uncommon, but having it happen repeatedly, at the worst possible time, is soul-crushingly rare.

Derek Falvey was asked about the failings when he met with the media following Wednesday’s elimination. Moreover, he was asked what can be done to reverse those fortunes in Octobers to come. Minnesota’s Chief Baseball Officer answered as best he could, but again, what’s beset his club is inexplicable.

I introduced that angle in a follow-up question near the end of Falvey’s session: Given the randomness of short series, is there truly anything that can be done to flip the postseason script? Are the Twins akin to the pre-2004 Red Sox in that they’ll only win once the Baseball Gods deem it time for them to win?

“I hear your perspective on trying to make sure we don’t overreact to some history,” responded Falvey. “We want to make sure that we assess this as objectively as we can… but I do think there is some reality that in a baseball season, over the course of two or three, or four or five games, things can go a little haywire on you — even if you feel you have a good foundation. Maybe if you played those games all over again, you might have a different result. I get that. That speaks to your question a little bit about randomness. Read the rest of this entry »