In your most prim and proper ballet teacher voice, repeat after me, “Demi-plié and stretch. Demi-plié and stretch.” The demi-plié is the first foundational move taught to new ballerinas. Its name translates from French to “small bend.” When pitching from the windup, Michael King comes set, gently bends at the knees, then stands tall for a moment before delivering the pitch. Setting aside his lack of turnout and hinge at the hip, King went about his business on Tuesday with the precision and artistry of a dancer.

Ballerinas value efficiency of movement above all else, and King needed just 89 pitches to complete seven shutout innings, while allowing just five hits, walking absolutely no one, and striking out 12. His performance earned a standing ovation from the Petco Park crowd, which went home happy after the Padres orchestrated a 4-0 win over the Braves in Game 1 of the best-of-three NL Wild Card series.

King stole the show with a well-choreographed approach that has served him well all year, and he executed every step at a high level. And lest we forget, this is King’s first season in a full-time starting role, his first year strategically piecing together his complement of pitches into the rhythm and flow of a start. Knowing that his goals now include facing batters of both handedness multiple times and throwing six or more innings each time out, King has evolved the three-pitch arsenal he debuted with to a five-pitch ensemble that he deploys with specific intent. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2022 change to a 12-team playoff format, the addition of the Wild Card Series, and the decision to do away with winner-take-all tiebreaker games, Major League Baseball thought it had stuck a fork in Team Entropy and done away with end-of-season scheduling chaos. But with the league’s failure to approach last week’s scheduled Braves-Mets series in Atlanta with the necessary level of proactivity in the face of Hurricane Helene, the two teams were forced to play a doubleheader on Monday to determine the final two NL Wild Card berths. While the Braves squandered leads of 3-0 and 7-6 in the late innings of the opener, the teams ultimately split the doubleheader; both finished 89-73 and made the cut, while the Diamondbacks, who played their final game as scheduled on Sunday, missed it because they lost their season series against the pair. The Braves had to fly cross-country on Monday night in order to make their date with Padres (93-69) in San Diego.

It’s a banged-up Braves team at that. Not only are they missing Ronald Acuña Jr., Austin Riley, and Spencer Strider due to season-ending injuries, but they’re now without Chris Sale. The 35-year-old lefty may well collect the Cy Young award that has long eluded him, but he hasn’t pitched since September 19. Much was made of the Braves’ plan to start him just once in the final week instead of twice, and just when the baseball world expected him to start the must-win second game of Monday’s doubleheader, he was ruled out due to back spasms. Manager Brian Snitker said after the win that he doesn’t expect Sale to pitch in the Wild Card Series, and added that this is something the pitcher has dealt with on and off this season. President of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos told reporters prior to Sale’s scratched start that he would not be going on the injured list. [Update: Sale was left off the roster submitted to the league on Tuesday morning.]

As for the Padres, after a disappointing 2023 season in which they won just 82 games and squandered a franchise-record $255 million payroll and a full season of Juan Soto, they’re back in the postseason for the third time in five seasons. It took awhile for the Padres to hit their stride; they were just 50-49 at the All-Star break but went a major league-best 43-20 (.683) thereafter. Not only did they secure the top NL Wild Card spot (and thus home field advantage here) but they even put a scare into the Dodgers before the latter won the NL West. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a bonus edition of Five Things I Liked (And Just Liked, This Doubleheader Was Glorious So Let’s Not Be Negative). This column usually runs on Fridays, and it’s supposed to be about a week’s worth of games played by every team in the majors. But uh, did you all see yesterday’s spectacle? The Mets and Braves played two to determine the NL playoff field, and all hell broke loose. We had wild bounces and hitters learning new skills in real time. We had lead changes and two-out rallies. We had Cy Young winners getting late scratches and relievers putting their team on their backs to protect the rest of the staff. The most dramatic day of baseball this year just happened, so let’s dive right into a rapid-fire edition of Five Things.

1. Tyrone Taylor’s Cueball

They say that you can throw the rules out the window when it gets down to sudden death. I’m not sure they meant the laws of physics, though. Two hundred years ago, this ball would have been accused of witchcraft:

Give Tyrone Taylor a lot of credit for sprinting out of the box on a baseball he hit pretty far foul. Give Spencer Schwellenbach credit for making this close at all. Most pitchers would have given up on that ball right away. Schwellenbach hustled over to it, grabbed it an instant after it rolled fair, and then made a nice scoop throw to Matt Olson at first, where Taylor ended up beating the throw by a slender margin:

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With the playoff fields in both leagues nearly set, we here at FanGraphs are turning our focus to how teams set up for October. Jay Jaffe has been covering the best players at each position among the contenders, as well as the worst. Dan Szymborski looked into the particulars of playoff lineup construction. Inspired by Meg Rowley, I’m taking a different tack: I’m looking for the players, strategies, and matchups that could be the difference between success and failure for each team.

We already know who the best players in baseball are, and they will of course be hugely important in the postseason. But less heralded players frequently have a lot to say about who takes home the World Series trophy. Think Steve Pearce and David Freese lengthening their respective lineups to turn those offenses from good to great, or the Braves bullpen mowing down the opposition in 2021. (On the flip side, you don’t hear a lot about teams let down by their supporting casts, because they mostly lose early on.) The best players aren’t always the most pivotal. In that spirit, I went through each team and focused on one potential pivot point. I looked at the American League yesterday; today, the National League gets its turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Games 163 will never happen as long as this current playoff format exists. Tiebreakers will be decided by head-to-head and then intraleague records, no matter how much Michael Baumann doesn’t want them to be. Team Entropy is dead. And so, we’ll know by the end of the weekend who’s going to be in the playoffs, and with what seeding — in the American League, anyway. We’ll get to the scheduling debacle in the National League in a moment.

Here’s what’s still left to be decided entering the final weekend of the regular season:

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The Dodgers’ defeat of the Padres on Wednesday night did a lot to clear up the last suspenseful division race by restoring their NL West lead to three games, reducing their magic number to two, and cutting the San Diego’s odds of winning the division to 3%. The bigger story, however — an infuriating one given commissioner Rob Manfred’s unwillingness to override the Braves’ profit-minded intransigence with some proactive schedule shifting — is the Hurricane Helene-induced postponement of the final two games of the Mets-Braves series. Unless the Diamondbacks slide completely out of the picture, the two NL East rivals will now play a 1:10 p.m. ET doubleheader in Atlanta on Monday, the day after the scheduled end of the regular season. Whichever of the two teams survives (possibly both) would then face flights to Milwaukee (locked in as the third seed) and/or California (either Los Angeles or San Diego as the fourth seed) to start their respective Wild Card series the next day, with their pitching staffs at a significant disadvantage. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Anyway, having gone around the horn and then some to identify the strongest players at each position among the remaining contenders in the National and American Leagues, we now turn to the weakest ones. This is something of an offshoot of my annual Replacement Level Killers series, and in fact, even some confirmed October participants have spots that still fit the bill as true lineup sinkholes, only this time with no trade deadline to help fill them. For this, I’m considering full-season performance but with an eye to who’s best or worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Unlike the Killers series, I’m also considering pitching, with the shortening of rotations and bullpens factoring into my deliberations.

In this installment, I’ll highlight the biggest trouble spots from among an NL field that includes the Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Padres, Diamondbacks, Mets, and Braves. Read the rest of this entry »

Even if you’re not a Braves fan, you probably know the rough contours of what’s gone down for them this season. The preseason World Series favorites have had horrid injury luck all year. The reigning MVP, Ronald Acuña Jr., scuffled for 50 games before tearing his ACL. Spencer Strider blew out his elbow. Austin Riley broke his hand, Ozzie Albies and Sean Murphy each missed two months, Michael Harris II has been banged up; you’ve heard it all before. And the stars who have been around haven’t played up to their potential. Only Chris Sale and Marcell Ozuna, two past-their-prime retreads the Braves expected to be support pieces, have given the team a fighting chance.

That was a good description of the Braves for part of the season, but it doesn’t capture their recent form. Harris started the year in a horrendous slump; he has a 122 wRC+ since the All-Star break. Riley brought the power before his injury. Jorge Soler has been a nice addition. But perhaps most importantly, Matt Olson is back.

Olson put up the best season of his career in 2023, and it wasn’t particularly close. He launched 54 homers, got on base at a career-best rate, and played every game en route to a gaudy 6.6 WAR. He finished fourth in MVP voting, his first top-five finish, and led the majors in homers and RBI. Our projections thought he’d be one of the best hitters in baseball this year, and they weren’t alone. Read the rest of this entry »

With six days left in the regular season — and six games for most teams — three teams have clinched their respective divisions (the Brewers, Guardians, and Phillies), and two others have clinched playoff berths (the Dodgers and Yankees). That leaves 10 teams fighting for seven spots, but even with the playoff field not fully set, we thought it would be a fun and worthwhile exercise to highlight various facets of the potential October teams by going around the diamond to identify the strongest and weakest at each position in each league.

This is something of an offshoot of my annual Replacement Level Killers series, and in fact even some confirmed October participants have spots that still fit the bill as true lineup sinkholes — think first base for the Yankees and Brewers, to pick one position from among the aforementioned teams — but this time with no trade deadline to help fill them. For this, I’ll be considering full-season performance but with an eye to who’s best or worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Unlike the Killers series, I’ll also be considering pitching, with the shortening of rotations and bullpens part of the deliberations.

For the first installment of this series, I’ll focus on each position’s best among the remaining National League contenders. In this case that limits the field to the Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Padres, Mets, Diamondbacks, and Braves, with the last three of those teams fighting for two Wild Card spots. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re running out of season. With the field of contenders winnowed to the point that only two teams have Playoff Odds between 8% and 80%, much of the intrigue beyond jockeying for seeding concerns a race against the clock. Players have only so much time to recover from injuries, particularly new ones, and so some returns are in doubt. Their availability could very well affect how the playoffs unfold.

On that front, it was a weekend featuring bad news for some contenders as they reckoned with their latest bad breaks, figuratively and literally. Gavin Stone, the unexpected stalwart of the Dodgers rotation, landed on the injured list due to shoulder inflammation, while Jeff McNeil, one of the Mets’ hottest hitters, suffered a fractured wrist. Whit Merrifield, who’s done good work filling in at second base for the Braves, broke a bone in his foot, and, if we shift focus to the fringes of the Wild Card race, the Mariners Luis Castillo strained a hamstring. Each of these situations deserves a closer look, so pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s only one playoff race this year. That might not sound right to you. The Yankees and Orioles are deadlocked in the AL East. The Guardians are holding the Twins and Royals at bay in the Central. The Padres are looking menacingly northwards toward LA. But those aren’t playoff races, because everyone involved is making the playoffs either way. The only race where the winner is in and the loser is out is the one for the last NL Wild Card spot, and it’s taking place between divisional rivals: the Mets and the Braves.

It’s weird seeing so little actual drama in September. Those two teams are the only ones with playoff odds between 20% and 80% right now. That’s rare for this time of year. There were seven such teams last year, six in 2022, and three in the top-heavy 2021 season. Even if we go back to the 10-team playoff era, the years from 2015-2019 averaged four teams in that 20-80% range with a month left in the season. Despite no truly dominant teams, the playoff races are abnormally set in stone this year.

That only makes the last race more exciting, though. In one corner, we have the Braves, who came into the year as the best team in baseball. They were so good, in fact, that we used them as a model when delving into some new depth chart data this spring. What might the Braves look like if they lost Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury? Our model thought they’d be a .551 team. Read the rest of this entry »