While Monday night’s World Series Game 3 victory might not qualify as Pyrrhic, it definitely came at a price for the Rangers. After three scoreless innings, starter Max Scherzer left with back tightness, forcing Jon Gray into an impromptu piggyback start. Adolis García, who is in the midst of a jaw-dropping, record-setting postseason run, left after seven innings with left side tightness. Meanwhile, two days removed from stealing one on the road in Texas, the Diamondbacks must feel deflated, losing 3-1 despite outhitting the Rangers, six hits to five. Texas now boast a 2-1 series lead.

Coming in, the question was about Scherzer’s thumb, which had developed a cut just below the base of the nail. He reportedly kept the wound from reopening with a concoction of super glue and cotton. It’s hard to say, but it could have had an effect on his pitching. Scherzer’s spin rate was below his season average on all five of his pitches (even during the first two innings, when his velocity was above his season average), and his curveball, slider, and changeup all had less movement than usual. Until his injury, Scherzer seemed to be benefitting from luck. He walked two and allowed two hits over his three innings, but he kept the Diamondbacks off the scoreboard by virtue of a double play, an outfield assist on some bad baserunning in the second inning, and a fortunate bounce on a comebacker. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s been one constant for the Diamondbacks during their run to the World Series, it hasn’t been dominant starting pitching or shutdown relief work, though they’ve gotten their shares of both. It’s been Ketel Marte, who has not only hit safely in all 14 of Arizona’s playoff games but also set a new postseason record on Saturday night with an 18-game hitting streak, dating back to 2017. He claimed the record by slapping a two-run eighth-inning single off Martín Pérez in Game 2.

Marte’s streak began with the 2017 NL Wild Card game, when his 3-for-5 showing against the Rockies (including starter and current Ranger Jon Gray) helped the Diamondbacks to an 11–8 win. He hit in all three games of the Division Series against the Dodgers, even homering off Clayton Kershaw, but the Diamondbacks were swept nonetheless. Six years later, the 30-year-old switch-hitter picked up where he left off, with a game-tying homer off Corbin Burnes in the NL Wild Card Series opener against the Brewers — one pitch after Corbin Carroll had homered off Burnes as well. His two-run single off Freddy Peralta in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series turned a 2–1 deficit into a 3–2 lead, sending the Diamondbacks on their merry way to their first upset of the postseason. Read the rest of this entry »

One sleepless night after Game 1 was ripped from them in heartbreaking fashion, the Diamondbacks arose from the canvas in Arlington and swung back at the Rangers en route to a dominant 9–1 victory, evening the World Series at a game apiece as the series heads to Phoenix. Arizona’s effort was led by a masterful performance from Scottsdale Desert Mountain High School and Arizona State alum Merrill Kelly, who struck out nine across seven surgical innings en route to the win. The Diamondbacks maintained a modest lead until the final three frames, when the bottom third of their order, which combined to reach base eight times on the night, piled up six runs.

Kelly is a prodigal son of sorts, a former Rays draft pick who left affiliated ball in the U.S. for four seasons in Korea before returning to MLB and his hometown Diamondbacks in 2019. Ironically, the particulars of the postseason schedule and of Arizona’s run to the Fall Classic have prevented Kelly from making a (literal) home start during this postseason, but he looked right at home in Texas on Saturday evening as he carved up one of the season’s most potent offenses. Read the rest of this entry »

For 25 outs, the Diamondbacks’ plan had worked to perfection. Zac Gallen had worked through five gritty innings, Corbin Carroll and Ketel Marte had given Arizona a lead to hand to the bullpen, and the relief corps had weathered a relentless Rangers lineup. As Paul Sewald entered in the ninth inning with a two-run lead, it looked like the Diamondbacks were on the verge of stealing a victory in Game 1 of the World Series. Corey Seager had other plans. On the first pitch he saw from Sewald, Seager launched a one-out, two-run bomb into the right field stands to tie the game at five.

With the game sent to extra innings, the momentum suddenly swung toward the Rangers, whose potent lineup could end the game quickly, even without the benefit of the Manfred Man on second base to start each inning. After a minor threat was quelled in the 10th, who else but Adolis García had the final word, blasting an opposite field, walk-off home run in the 11th to send Globe Life Field into a state of jubilation. Read the rest of this entry »

In the cat and mouse game that is the postseason, every decision matters, regardless of how big or small. If a marginal competitive advantage can be exploited, odds are a team will take their chance. Last year, I investigated what I thought was a key reason for the Astros’ postseason success over the last decade. The piece explored swing path diversity and how Houston had more of it than any other team from 2021 to 2022. Constructing a balanced, dynamic lineup is one of the tools teams can use to keep pitchers and opposing managers honest. There are multiple ways to define balance in a lineup, including swing aggression, whiff tendencies, speed and athleticism, and handedness. But that piece focused on variance in Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) within lineups.

If you aren’t familiar with VBA, it’s the vertical orientation of the bat at contact, where 45 degrees is a diagonal bat. It is pitch height dependent – the number goes down as height increases (flatter bat) and goes up as height decreases (steeper bat), making it vary within a player’s own swing profile. There is also variance player to player. On average, Aaron Judge and Freddie Freeman have much steeper barrels at impact than flatter-swinging hitters like Juan Soto and Randy Arozarena. VBA is one of multiple important bat tracking metrics — horizontal bat angle, point of contact, bat speed, acceleration, and time to contact are a few others — but VBA is the most easily accessible due to the computer vision work done at SwingGraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

No team gets to the World Series without leaning on some of their depth, and part of what gets a team to the finish line is how this supporting cast performs. Name a championship squad, and it’s a safe bet it got some significant contributions from a handful or third and fourth starters, long relievers, hitters further down the lineup, etc.

I’m not a betting man, but I wouldn’t have picked Brandon Pfaadt to be one of those players for one of this year’s World Series teams. Pfaadt, who just turned 25 last week, had a bit of a rocky rookie season, posting a 5.72 ERA, 5.18 FIP, and 4.46 xFIP in 96 innings over 18 starts split by a pair of demotions to Triple-A Reno. He got hit for hard contact, and the strikeout numbers that mitigated the damage in the minors faded when he got to the majors in May. He did get stronger as the year went on, posting a 4.14 ERA, 3.89 FIP, and 3.89 xFIP in August and September — more on that later — but I wouldn’t have expected him to be on the mound for some of the biggest starts of the season — and for the Diamondbacks to win all of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching playoff baseball is like cramming for a test. Most people watching are either casual fans of the sport or diehard fans of one team only, so it’s incumbent on national writers and broadcasters to get their audiences up to speed quickly. Sometimes that takes the form of an information dump; other times, a team gets distilled down to a couple of talking points. And for a team that was not expected to make the World Series, has a lot of young players, and doesn’t play in a particularly fashionable media market — like, say, the Arizona Diamondbacks — the talking points can be a little crude.

In this case, the Diamondbacks are like a preschooler on a sugar high: Young, small, and always running.

For the first five games of the NLCS, this bullet point looked a little silly, as Arizona attempted just a single stolen base against a Phillies team that holds runners well. But in Games 6 and 7, the Diamondbacks opened up the taps and reaped the rewards: eight stolen bases in eight attempts, leading directly to two runs. Which in turn led to, as you know, winning the pennant.

Can they repeat the trick against the Rangers in the World Series? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the nice things about the playoffs is that there’s often just one game happening at a time. Don’t get me wrong. I love a summer day with a full slate of 15 games, but you are where your attention is, and there’s too much baseball happening in any one day for us to be present for all of it. When the whole of the baseball world gets compressed down to one high-stakes game, you catch little things that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

During the NLCS, I noticed a little thing about Kevin Ginkel. It was about how he holds runners on second base, and man, does he hold runners on second base. Here’s the pitch that caught my attention:

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The World Series. It’s a playoff-capping battle that’s so iconic that other sports and activities borrow its name. The World Series of Poker, of Darts, of Snooker, the FINA Marathon Swim World Series, even briefly the World Series of Country Music Proudly Presents Stock Car Racing’s Entertainers of the Year – these events didn’t pick their name by accident, they’re basking in the glory of a long-running staple. Even as baseball matters less and less, the World Series is a big name on the marquee.

One of the best parts of playoff baseball, at least in my eyes, is that the brightest stage isn’t exclusively the domain of the top couple of teams in the game. Sure, the Dodgers and Astros have been there a lot in the last decade. Sure, the Cardinals and Yankees have a bunch of rings. But baseball is a variance-rich sport, and the playoffs are short. Make the dance and you might end up one of the last few teams standing, even if your squad doesn’t have its own wing in Cooperstown. One obvious example? This year’s clash between the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The Rangers are the closest thing we’re going to get to a postseason standby here. Sure, their last playoff appearance before this run came in 2016, but their roster is packed with playoff heroes. Corey Seager carried the Dodgers to a 2020 title. Max Scherzer seems to always be pitching in win-or-die games. Nathan Eovaldi saved Boston’s bacon in 2018 and has made a career out of coming up big in important spots. Will Smith pitched for the last two World Series winners (seriously!). Aroldis Chapman isn’t what he once was, but at his peak, he was a key figure in breaking the century-long Cubs curse. Their manager is Bruce Freaking Bochy, an October legend who has never lost a Game 7. The Rangers as a franchise might not be a World Series name brand – their trips to the Fall Classic in 2010 and 2011 ended in losses — but the ingredients are no different than what you’d expect to get in the luxury aisle. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – “A lot of people don’t believe in us,” Diamondbacks infielder Geraldo Perdomo said before Game 7 of the NLCS. “I think that’s why we play with the patience we’re playing with right now, to prove to everyone we can do it.”

“Nobody believed in us” is such a hackneyed trope in sports motivation, one that’s been co-opted over and over by teams that everyone believed in. But Perdomo was absolutely right to invoke it; the Diamondbacks were the lowest seed in this year’s playoffs, and before that a dark horse to make the postseason at all. They were under .500 in August, for goodness’ sake. Manager Torey Lovullo was asked after Game 7 if, in mid-August, he thought he’d be in this situation now. “To be totally honest, no,” he said.

But here they are. They took two must-win games against the defending National League champions in one of the most hostile environments in baseball, the latest by a score of 4-2. And now the Diamondbacks, pennant in hand, are off for Texas and a shot at the second World Series title in club history. Read the rest of this entry »