In the five days between the World Series and the start of free agency, there’s plenty of paperwork to do — exercising or declining options, sorting out 40-man roster spots, that sort of thing — before a team starts the offseason in earnest. Sometimes, that shuffling reveals a landing spot for a player who was going to be turned loose anyway, and we get a trade.

Mark Canha, your friendly neighborhood on-base machine, is headed from Milwaukee to Detroit, with 25-year-old Double-A reliever Blake Holub headed in the opposite direction. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, the Rangers scratched their names off of one of baseball’s most undesirable lists: the franchises that had never in their history won a World Series. Major League Baseball is known for its historical championship parity; the sport’s 23 seasons without a repeat champion is the longest streak in the four major American sports leagues, and the Rangers became the ninth unique World Series champion in the last 10 years. But heading into Wednesday’s Game 5, six of the 30 MLB clubs — a full 20% — had never reached the promised land. On Thursday morning, it was down to five: the Brewers, Padres, Mariners, Rockies, and Rays. With the Rangers happy to leave that club, who should we expect to be the next to follow?

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You might have noticed a surfeit of bunting in this postseason, or at least it seemed that way because Geraldo Perdomo was in the World Series. I, the man who launched an impromptu Bunt Week two months ago, could not let the opportunity pass to sit in judgment of these bunts.

We often decry the sacrifice bunt as a needless waste of outs, but a bunt for a hit can be one of the most audacious, skilled plays in the sport, as beautiful in its own way as a light-tower home run. In fact, every bunt is distinctive and wonderful, and so each must be examined — all 26 of them — for procedural and results-based value, tactical and strategic context, as well as aesthetic value. These are just the 26 bunts that resulted in action, according to Baseball Savant, so be warned: failed bunt attempts are not featured. If you’re looking for that failed Trea Turner push bunt in Game 7 of the NLCS, you will not find it here. (Though for the record, I didn’t hate it.)

Let us judge the bunts. Read the rest of this entry »

The wild card round is already short enough, and this year, all four matchups ended in sweeps. That’s not much postseason baseball for the Rays, Blue Jays, Brewers, and Marlins. Suffice it to say, none of those teams took October, despite what the t-shirts promised.

While I feel a twinge of heartache for the losing side in any postseason matchup, I feel especially bad for the first-round exits. After a 162-game slog with the playoffs as the only goal, their season is over in the blink of an eye. With time, some will be forgotten as contenders entirely. That seems a shame, considering how well each of these teams performed in the regular season.

With that in mind, I wanted to take one last moment to recognize the playoff performances of Miami, Milwaukee, Toronto, and Tampa Bay, before the winds of the postseason blow on to the Division Series matchups. To be clear, there isn’t a ton to celebrate; they were each swept, after all. Still, every eliminated team had at least one player whose postseason showing deserves a pat on the back. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to rank each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Coverage of the Twins’ sweep of the Blue Jays focused on Carlos Correa’s crafty veteran playoff leadership, but Royce Lewis, Pablo López, and Jhoan Duran were key parts of Minnesota’s victory too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Correa is important because he’s a great player and great leader, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Yesterday, I covered the two American League teams that lost in the first round. Today, it’s the senior circuit’s turn. Read the rest of this entry »

By overcoming Brandon Pfaadt’s rough start and connecting for three homers and four runs in four innings against Corbin Burnes, the Diamondbacks put themselves in a position to close out their best-of-three series against the Brewers on Wednesday night. In the early going, it looked like Milwaukee would flip the script by knocking around Arizona ace Zac Gallen and forcing a third game. The 28-year-old righty pulled himself together after allowing a pair of first-inning runs, however, and his teammates finally solved Freddy Peralta after he dominated them for five innings, breaking the game open in the sixth and hanging on for a 5-2 win at American Family Field. The Diamondbacks will advance to face the Dodgers in the Division Series.

For much of the night, it appeared these two teams were headed for a rubber match. Gallen was one of the majors’ top pitchers this year, and spent much of the season as the frontrunner for the NL Cy Young Award, but a flurry of home runs from June to August, and a whole lot of hard contact in general, probably took him out of serious consideration. Still, he finished second in the league in innings (210), third in WAR (5.2), fifth in FIP (3.27) and seventh in ERA (3.47).

The Diamondbacks looked to be in good hands, but from the outset on Wednesday, Gallen hardly pitched like an an ace. While he ranked sixth among qualified starters in first-pitch strike percentage during the regular season (66.4%), he fell behind each of the first three Brewers, preventing him from going to his secondary stuff more quickly, and the hitters made him pay. Christian Yelich laced a 2-0 fastball to right field for a leadoff single. William Contreras got ahead 2-0 as well, but ultimately whiffed on a curveball on the seventh pitch of the plate appearance while Yelich — who had already drawn two pickoff throws from Gallen — stole second. Carlos Santana got ahead 3-0, and twisted the knife by working a nine-pitch walk. 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 »

It looked like the mismatch of all mismatches. Brandon Pfaadt is not a playoff ace, to put it mildly. The Diamondbacks rookie struggled mightily in his first taste of the majors; though he’s undoubtedly a top prospect, he scuffled his way to a 5.72 ERA and 5.18 FIP. He was better after a midseason demotion, but not that much better, running up a 4.22 ERA and 4.35 FIP in his second major league go-round.

On the flip side, Corbin Burnes is a Cy Young winner who righted the ship after an iffy start to the season. The Brewers gave him a light workload in September to set him up for the playoffs, and he rewarded them with a 2.51 ERA (3.15 FIP) in the month. A matchup against Zac Gallen might have been a fair fight. Instead, the Brewers spent time setting up their ace for the Game 1 start, and the Diamondbacks had to improvise after a furious push to the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

After missing out on the postseason last year, breaking a four-year streak, the Brewers are back in the playoffs this year. They’ve been the model of consistency over this past half decade; they are the only other team apart from the Astros and Dodgers to have won at least 86 games in each of the last six full seasons. But for all that regular season success, they’ve only won one postseason series during this stretch, a Division Series back in 2018. They have one of the strongest run prevention units in baseball and are hoping that will carry them deep into October.

Milwaukee’s first-round opponent, the Diamondbacks, will be making their first playoff appearance since 2017. They’re breaking out of a long rebuilding cycle a little ahead of schedule thanks to the phenomenal rookie campaign of Corbin Carroll. On paper, they’re significant underdogs when compared to the dominant arms the Brewers can bring to bear, but they’ve got enough young talent to make some noise as a surprise contender:

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The playoffs start on Tuesday, 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 American League counterpart, which will run tomorrow, will 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 »