Let me be very clear: This doesn’t matter. What I’m about to show you is small sample size theater. It’s not statistically significant. It has no bearing on what’s actually going to happen in the World Series. We are here for a fun fact rather than a learning opportunity. Are we all in agreement? Okay, then let me show you something wild. Here are Aaron Judge’s career numbers against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, uh, yeah. A .389 batting average is good. A slugging percentage in the thousands is good. A wRC+ over 300 is also good. Just in case you were wondering how good those numbers are, here’s a table that shows the best career numbers against the Dodgers, minimum 40 plate appearances, courtesy of our splits leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to throwing shade in the playoffs in recent years, nothing has caught as much – not even your least favorite broadcaster – than the concept of home field advantage. The reason for the negative feelings isn’t surprising. Other than a possible first-round bye, home field advantage is the main reward for playoff teams that win more regular-season games than other playoff teams.

It’s true that home teams have struggled in recent postseasons, but they actually haven’t been too bad this year. The 19-18 record of home teams isn’t the most scintillating of tallies, but their .513 winning percentage across 37 games is not exactly a stunning departure from the .522 winning percentage for home teams during the 2024 regular season. The most games a team can possibly play in a single postseason is 22, and nine points of winning percentage works out to only 0.2 wins per 22 games.

Naturally, the data are noisy given the relatively small number of postseason games, even under the current format, but the recent issues with home field advantage seem to mostly be a 2023 thing, when home teams went 15-26, comfortably their worst year. Smoothing out the data a bit doesn’t really do much, either.

You can always find an oddity if you shave data paper-thin like prosciutto, but with data as volatile as this, you’ll mostly end up with bleeps and bloops that don’t really mean anything. Like, sure, teams are 29-31 since 1995 at home in Game 7s and Game 5s, but that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS home teams going 4-12 in their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 one more time, I went back and looked at the projections, both from ZiPS and regular-season record or Pythagorean record. Using each team’s actual 2023 record, the average home team in the playoffs had a .562 regular-season winning percentage; it was .551 for the road teams. It’s a .564/.553 split using the Pythagorean records. But I still have all the projected matchups and rosters at the start of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the results of every actual game that was played. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game basis, with home field advantage completely removed from the equation, the road teams were actually slightly stronger, projecting the average home team at .545 and the average road team at .556. Facing off against each other, ZiPS expected home teams to have a .489 record in the 31 actual playoff games, with an 8% chance of going 15-26 or worse.

Looking at the Wild Card era as a whole, home teams have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs games. In the regular season over the same era, home teams have a .537 winning percentage. In other words, the playoffs just aren’t that different from the regular season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff winning percentage for the home team in a game of exactly equal teams.) So why does it feel so bad? I suspect one reason can be found in the charts above. Home teams had a pretty good run in the mid-2010s, on the heels of the expansion from eight to 10 playoff teams, peaking at a .581 winning percentage from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the feeling that home field advantage is working as intended, and the five-year runs stayed slightly above the historical trend until the 2023 home field crash.

Since that crash feels especially bad, it’s natural that people search for deeper meaning in data that don’t really have a lot to give. One common cry was blaming the long layoffs from the bye round. This argument doesn’t hold up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It also doesn’t have much to do with modern baseball or modern players, either. Home field advantage has been relatively stable in the regular season throughout baseball history.

There’s been some long-term decline, but nothing earth-shattering.

The larger problem is simply that fundamentally, home field advantage just isn’t a big deal in baseball. It’s not as big a deal in other sports as some think, but unlike in the other major sports, the difference in baseball between a great team, a good team, a lousy team, and the Chicago White Sox is not that large. Other sports don’t need home field advantage to be as much of a differentiator, especially in the playoffs. A few years back, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances rate of the NBA playoffs, MLB teams would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I certainly love me some baseball, but I can’t imagine I’d still watch World Series Game 63 with the same intensity as I do every Fall Classic game now. Besides, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make that a practical impossibility anyway.

Even giving the team with more wins home field advantage in every single game doesn’t drastically weight the dice. Assuming a .535 home winning percentage and evenly matched teams, the home team would require a best-of-13 series to become a 60/40 favorite; to increase its odds to 2-to-1, we’d have to make it a best-of-39 series. Just to experiment, I simulated series with the normal postseason distribution of home field advantage (one extra game) between two teams, the one in which the home team is .020 wins better than its opponent (just over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for how often the better team would be expected to win, based on series length.

So what does this all mean? In all likelihood, home field advantage in the playoffs hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. And isn’t really all that big of a deal in the first place. Without altering the very nature of the postseason significantly — aggressive changes such as requiring the lower-seeded team sweep in the Wild Card series to advance — baseball has a very limited ability to reward individual playoff teams based on their regular-season results. Home field advantage isn’t broken; it’s working in the extremely limited way that one should expect. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series this year, it probably won’t be because they were rewarded one more possible home game.

You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.

That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.

Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better. Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond offering the rare clash between number one seeds, this year’s World Series matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees is steeped in baseball history and — as anyone who’s read me over the past two and a half decades knows — is of great personal resonance. The last time the two teams met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, I was an 11-year-old baseball nut hoping his favorite team could avenge its back-to-back World Series losses from ’77 and ’78. I could never have imagined that I’d get to cover their next October matchup. For most of the country, this pairing’s biggest selling point beyond the top-seed aspect and the involvement of the sport’s two most storied franchises is the presence of the game’s two biggest stars. Both the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge are coming off historic seasons that will likely net them MVP awards, though things haven’t come quite so easily for either of them in the postseason.

We won’t officially know until November whether Judge and Ohtani both won the awards, but even working from the assumption that they will, this is hardly the first time that two likely MVPs have squared off in the World Series. In fact, it’s happened 25 times since 1931, with four such pairings from among the 11 times the Yankees and Dodgers have met. That said, it’s just the second such meeting since the start of the Wild Card era (1995 onward) and the sixth since the start of the Division era (1969 onward). MVP choices may be driven less by team success these days, but even when they are, the expanded playoff field makes getting to the World Series much harder:

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Sunday night’s NLCS Game 6 offered quite a contrast in its starting pitcher matchup. With a chance to push the series to a decisive Game 7, the Mets started Sean Manaea, a 32-year-old lefty who made a full complement of 32 starts during the regular season, set a career high for innings pitched (181 2/3), and had already made three strong postseason starts, allowing five runs across 17 innings. On the other side, with an opportunity to close out the series and claim their fourth pennant in eight seasons, the Dodgers tabbed Michael Kopech, a 28-year-old righty who started 27 games last year but hadn’t done so once this year, instead pitching out of the bullpen 67 times in the regular season and four more in the playoffs. The unorthodox choice owed to the Dodgers’ injury-wracked rotation. Los Angeles has barely been able to muster three workable starters for October, let alone four, and so manager Dave Roberts has resorted to sprinkling in bullpen games, with mixed results.

The ballgame turned out to be a mismatch, but not in the way you might have imagined. Kopech struggled with his control, throwing just 12 strikes out of his 25 pitches, walking two, and allowing one hit and one run. If he set a tone for the rest of the Dodgers staff, it was that this was going to be a grind, the outcome hinging on their ability to navigate out of traffic — which they did, stranding 13 runners while yielding “only” five runs. Meanwhile Manaea, who had limited the Dodgers to two hits and two earned runs over five innings in NLCS Game 2, lasted just two-plus innings and was battered for six hits while walking two. He was charged with five runs, four of which came off the bat of Tommy Edman in the form of a two-run double in the first inning and a two-run homer in the third.

The Dodgers weren’t expecting Kopech to go any deeper, leaving Roberts to follow a script that allowed him to utilize his remaining relievers to best effect (such as it was). The Mets harbored hopes that Manaea could at least pitch into the middle innings so that manager Carlos Mendoza could avoid deploying some of their lesser relievers, but the starter faltered so early that they didn’t have that luxury. As it was, the fifth run charged to Manaea scored when Phil Maton, already carrying an 8.44 ERA this October, was summoned with no outs in the third and didn’t escape before serving up a two-run homer to Will Smith. Faced with a 6-1 deficit, the Mets refused to go quietly, but went down just the same in a 10-5 loss that included 14 pitchers combining to allow 22 hits and 12 walks. It was excruciating viewing, and with a pennant on the line, one couldn’t help but wish instead for starters battling deep into the game. Alas, this was hardly atypical October baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — The killer feature of a pitcher like Sean Manaea, circa October 2024, is the capacity to deceive. As has been documented at length, Manaea changed his arm angle midseason, dropping down from 28 degrees in April to 15 degrees by September. That move paid immediate dividends; Manaea dominated for the New York Mets down the stretch and excelled in the postseason. Because Manaea now throws from an arm angle so low to the ground, his high fastballs come in at an extremely flat vertical approach angle. A flat VAA distorts the hitter’s perception, creating the illusion of “rise.”

Squaring up a high fastball thrown from that angle with a flat swing requires incredible precision. If the bat is a few millimeters high, the hitter will drive the ball into the ground; a few millimeters low, and you’ve got a harmless popup.

No matter for Tommy Edman. In the third inning of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, Manaea whipped a four-seamer with a -3.78 degree VAA to the tippy top of the zone; Edman ripped it into the left field bleachers for a two-run home run, effectively knocking Manaea out of the game. Edman racked up four RBI on Sunday, powering the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 10-5 victory and sending them to face the New York Yankees in the World Series.

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NEW YORK — Less than 20 minutes before what might have been the final game of the year at Citi Field, the OMG Mets introduced one more good-vibes gimmick. Five, actually.

The Temptations, the legendary Motown band, took the field behind home plate dressed in their signature suits and sang the National Anthem. Moments later, the quintet donned Mets jerseys and performed “My Girl,” their classic song that is played here whenever Francisco Lindor steps to the plate. If the Mets were going to be eliminated in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, at least they’d go down singing.

Turns out, the Temptations were just the opening act for a three-hour rock revival. When it was over, the Mets had blown out the Dodgers, 12-6, and ensured that their remarkable run would continue for at least another game.

“We’ve played with our backs against the wall the whole year, and we’ve been able to rise to the occasion,” left fielder Brandon Nimmo said. “Some might say we’re at our best at that time. If anybody can do it, we can do it.” Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Though he wasn’t the offensive star of Game 3 of the National League Championship Series — he didn’t hit a moonshot into the second deck like Shohei Ohtani or Max Muncy — Will Smith did collect two hits in the Dodgers’ 8-0 victory over the Mets. They weren’t exactly scorchers, but one was of critical importance, as it drove in the game’s first run. Remarkably, Smith’s performance was just the second time this postseason that a catcher has collected multiple hits in a game, and for as much as Smith has struggled, his numbers still stand out relative to the competition. It’s been an exceptionally difficult October for the men wearing the tools of ignorance.

These days, those tools actually suggest anything but ignorance. Armed with more data than ever, and playing in a pressure-cooker atmosphere where a single pitch can turn a series, Smith and those of his peers who are still standing (or squatting) in October — namely the Yankees’ Austin Wells, the Mets’ Francisco Alvarez, and the Guardians’ tandem of Bo Naylor and Austin Hedges — might be required to navigate a short-working starter and half a dozen relievers through opposing lineups, controlling the tempo of the game when things threaten to spiral out of control, and shaking off untold aches and pains. Hitting? That’s part of the job, but this fall, these catchers’ offensive contributions have felt particularly secondary, not unlike those of pitchers swinging the bat in the days before the universal designated hitter.

The numbers certainly look like those bygone pitchers hacking away. Thus far, the catchers for the 12 postseason teams have collectively hit .169/.236/.255 (40 wRC+) with five homers and a 28.3% strikeout rate through 254 plate appearances. In other words, they’ve been outhit by Madison Bumgarner (.172/.232/.292, 44 wRC+ career). Read the rest of this entry »

In baseball history, there have been 15 players signed to contracts worth a total of $300 million or more. The Dodgers started three of those 15 players on Thursday night — Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. That’s a ridiculous amount of money, especially for such a trivial enterprise as baseball. When a team — even a team as well-resourced as the Dodgers — spends that much money on a trio of players, it means they really want to win.

Well, the syndicate of investors at Guggenheim Baseball Management got their money’s worth on Thursday. Ohtani homered to lead off the game and added three walks, scoring four runs in total. Betts went 4-for-6 with three runs and a homer of his own, which took the Dodgers’ lead from tenuous to comfortable in the sixth. And Yamamoto struck out eight batters in 4 1/3 innings as the Dodgers won 10-2. The World Series is now just one win away. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani doesn’t have a hit with the bases empty. I kept hearing that throughout FS1’s broadcast of Game 3 of the NLCS. My first thought was, “Wow, I’m old enough to remember when they dogged star players for not hitting well enough with runners on base! I guess some people will find any reason to complain!”

My second thought was, “Huh, I thought Ohtani was having a decent postseason.” It could be better, of course. Ohtani is hitting .226/.351/.419, which I suppose is disappointing from a player with a legitimate case for being the greatest of all time. But if you told most managers that their leadoff hitter would post a .351 OBP through the first eight games of the playoffs, most of them would take it. Out of 58 players with 20 or more plate appearances this postseason, Ohtani is 18th in wRC+ and 11th in WPA. By any objective standard, Ohtani’s been perfectly adequate at the plate overall. Read the rest of this entry »