MILWAUKEE — Game 1 of the NLCS was an exemplary display of mid-2020s playoff baseball, a dramatic and finely poised showcase of high-powered pitching and expansive defense. Game 2 was a hot dog, loaded with chili and onions, and dropped clumsily down the diner’s shirt.
And yet, the result was the same: The Brewers got the odd solo homer to center to erase an early Dodger lead, and a small-ball run put Milwaukee up for good. This one had a little more action — the 7-4 final marks the highest-scoring NL playoff game this year, as well as the Brewers’ highest offensive output in their past 13 postseason games. They are now halfway toward answering a humiliating sweep in last year’s NLCS with a sweep of their own.
Heroes outnumbered passengers for Milwaukee in Game 2. William Contreras went 3-for-4 with a walk and a monster home run, but four of his teammates also had multi-hit games. Every Brewers position player except Jackson Chourio reached base. As they piled on the insurance runs, four of their pitchers contributed perfect relief stints. When Game 2 started, only two Brewers in history had scored three runs in a playoff game; David Hamilton and Brice Turang both tied that record in the span of three plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
MILWAUKEE — A year ago, the Dodgers came to Milwaukee as the lower seed in the NLCS and blew the doors off the Brewers. Milwaukee scored four runs, total, in a four-game sweep. Both teams’ rosters have evolved, and individual players have changed for better (Jacob Misiorowski) or worse (Shohei Ohtani), but what could possibly be so different this time around? As Dan Szymborski wrote in his series preview, teams that get beat in a playoff series are 17-28 all-time when afforded a rematch the following year. Teams that get swept are 0-5.
Well, at least one thing’s different: The Brewers aren’t going to get swept this time. They checked off the hardest item on their to-do list — beat Tarik Skubal — right away, with a 2-1 win at a sold-out American Family Field. Misiorowski made hard work of his 4 1/3-inning stint, but some terrific infield defense allowed him to escape with a single run on the board, and a solo homer by Brice Turang preceded an RBI single by Luis Lara an inning later. After another four innings, the Brewers had taken Round 1. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Los Angeles Dodgers finished off the Atlanta Braves in Game 4 of the NLDS, they set up a rematch of last year’s NLCS against the Milwaukee Brewers. Last time around, the Brewers, coming off an extremely successful 97-65 season, ran into the Dodger buzzsaw and were swept out of the postseason. While Milwaukee mostly kept Los Angeles’ offense in check, the Brew Crew could only muster one run in each of their four games, and when that’s all you manage to score, you have to pitch shutouts to prevail. As noted in many a book and movie, revenge frequently comes with a good deal of satisfaction, whatever Herman Melville may have thought. And the Brewers now have the chance to turn the tables on the Dodgers and stymie their quest for baseball’s first three-peat (please don’t sue me, Pat Riley) of the 21st century.
Going back to the start of the modern World Series in 1903, there have been 45 consecutive-year postseason rematches in major league history (here we’re including a rematch in any playoff series the following year). In 17 of those 45 rematches, the previous year’s loser got their revenge, but no team has immediately avenged a playoff sweep. Granted, before now, there have only been five chances for a team to get vengeance the year after being swept in the playoffs — Orioles-Twins in 1970, Yankees-Rangers in 1999, Cardinals-Padres in 2006, Red Sox-Angels in 2008, and Yankees-Twins in 2010 — but it still gives the Brewers the opportunity to do something that’s never been done before.
ZiPS favors the Dodgers by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin in the NLCS. But with the fourth-most wins in the majors over the last decade, including the most wins in each of the last two seasons, the Brewers aren’t your typical scrappy underdog fighting for table scraps. Yet, in another sense, they are: Every year, they crush the expectations of fans, the Vegas oddsmakers, and projection systems. As the developer of one of those projection systems, I’ve spent a lot of time scratching my head over how the Brewers so routinely defy the expectations of my model in a way no other team has, and while I think I’ve identified the mechanism of my humiliation, I’m still trying to figure out how to model it. Read the rest of this entry »
A few weeks ago, I led the mailbag with some quick thoughts on the thrilling AL Central race between the White Sox and the Guardians. When I wrote that introduction, Cleveland had just won two of its final three regular-season games against Chicago, and the two teams were tied atop the division.
Neither club was all that good, but each was intriguing in its own way. The White Sox, of course, had the worst playoff odds of any team in the American League on Opening Day and were coming off three straight 100-loss seasons. The Guardians, meanwhile, were postseason regulars, and this year, they had trailed Chicago in the standings for most of the summer before mounting a September comeback. Cleveland maintained its division lead for the rest of the season, but only barely. The Guards finished 85-77; the Sox, 84-78. Their head-to-head records were also separated by just one game, with Chicago holding the advantage there. Now, as the two teams enter tonight’s ALDS Game 5 in Cleveland, the margin between them remains as thin as garlic slices in a mafia movie. Both clubs still aren’t exactly playing crisp baseball — the series has featured bewildering bullpen decisions, befuddling ABS challenges, and more hit-by-pitches (six) than home runs (four) — but they’ve been a ton of fun to watch.
In this week’s mailbag, we’re answering your questions on the worst regular-season players to start regularly for a playoff team, the best starting pitcher matchups in a postseason Game 3, and holy WAR. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
On the heels of an utterly spectacular Division Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres — a walk-off, a home run robbery, twopaternity leaves, oh my! — I found myself chewing on two pervasive thoughts. One: that was a hell of a series, and it really deserved a fifth game. Two: how many other Division Series have been on that level?
Since the Division Series’ true birth in 1995 (the 1981 strike led to a one-off set of Division Series that autumn, which then went dormant until the next strike made them permanent) we’ve now had 128 of them, with 41 ending in sweeps and 39 going all the way to a do-or-die Game 5, with the ongoing White Sox-Guardians series becoming the 40th. While early-round series in any sport are bound to have some impossibly stacked rosters beating the brakes off ahead-of-schedule teams that are just happy to be cashing playoff bonuses, the history of the Division Series is also rich with indelible postseason memories. With baseball’s inherent small-sample wackiness often playing a huge role — in 2023, both the 100-win Dodgers and 101-win Orioles were swept out of the Division Series by the unlikeliest World Series participants of the decade — these series often shrink the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Sure, sometimes you get a quick sweep where all three games are forgettable, but if you take a fine-tooth comb through the LDS annals, you’ll also find some 3-0 sets that were dripping with tension. (In 1996, for instance, the Cardinals swept the Padres in a series where San Diego sent the tying run to the plate in the ninth inning of all three games.)
This ranking of the best Division Series ever does not include any of those sweeps, or even any four-gamers, though many tried their damnedest. Division Series touchstones like Pedro Martínez coming out of the bullpen for six untouchable innings or Todd Pratt’s improbable homer play well in a highlight reel, but one great moment does not make a great series. The same thing is true of remarkable Game 5s that capped off an otherwise blah affair. We all remember Howie Kendrick’s 2019 grand slam at Dodger Stadium, but forget that the average margin of victory in that Nationals-Dodgers showdown was 4.6 runs. The same thing is true of the Dodgers’ Division Series in 2021 against the Giants, which ended with Max Scherzer’s only career save and sparked the great check swing debate of our times, but also had games decided by four, five, and seven runs.
For a series to be wholly great, it needs start-to-finish drama, star power, and multiple classic games; a little sprinkling of narrative intrigue doesn’t hurt either. Here are the 10 best of the Division Series variety, presented in descending order.
10. All of 2012
This one is obviously cheating, but 2012 is the only year in which all four Division Series went five games, so it gets its own spot. The fact that shorthand is a sufficient way to summarize many of the key events — the Buster Posey grand slam, the Pete Kozma game, the Raul Ibanez game, Justin Verlander vs. Oakland Round 1 — is all you need to know about how spectacular the second week of October was in 2012.
9. 2016 – Dodgers Beat Nationals 3-2
There was a time in the not-so-distant past where the dominant conversation surrounding Dodgers playoff games was that Clayton Kershaw wasn’t very good in them, and that the Los Angeles bullpen was even worse. This narrative clung to the Dodgers as they entered the 2016 postseason having been bounced in the Division Series each of the last two years. This time, though, led by young first-year manager Dave Roberts, questions abounded regarding the team’s overall postseason mettle.
While those were somewhat quieted by Kershaw outdueling Scherzer to take a tight Game 1, the Dodgers dropped each of the next two games, one of which featured Kenley Jansen puking up four earned runs. Allow me to briefly remember some other Dodger bullpen guys who played a big role in this series: Luis Avilán, Pedro Báez, Joe Blanton, and Grant Dayton each made at least three appearances. Avilán, Báez, and Blanton were all dynamite, escaping the series without giving up an earned run. Dayton, however, was the reason the Dodgers nearly blew it again. He took the mound for the seventh inning of Game 5, the Dodgers holding a three-run lead. He was tasked with the bottom of Washington’s lineup, the type of thing that seems simple until you remember that absolutely nothing is simple in playoff baseball. He walked Danny Espinosa, gave up a pinch-hit bomb to Chris Heisey, and then let Clint Robinson reach on a single.
From there, somewhat famously, Roberts aggressively fired Jansen and Kershaw for the final nine outs. Kershaw not only logged his first and only major league save that night, he did so while coming into a messy inning with the tying run in scoring position. This brief but successful outing was as storybook as it gets, removing a fairly sizable monkey yelling about postseason shortcomings from his back. Let us also quickly pay respect to Chase Utley, whose game-winning hit in Game 4 saved the Dodgers’ bacon.
8. 2017 – Yankees Beat Cleveland 3-2
The 2017 Yankees remain the last team to lose the first two games of an LDS and still win the series, though the Guardians could change that on Saturday. Falling into that hole made for an exigent series in its own right, but the Yankees starting the comeback with seven shutout innings from Masahiro Tanaka and a left-on-left Greg Bird homer against a warlock reliever made it even more impressive.
Luis Severino pitched the game of his life to win Game 4, and Didi Gregorius thumped two homers off Corey Kluber, who’d go on to win his second Cy Young that year, to win Game 5. There are so many other things from this series to mention, like how Aaron Judge struck out 16 times, comfortably breaking the Division Series record, or how Cleveland committed a mind-boggling nine errors in five games. It would also be a tremendous oversight not to mention that Game 2 — a 9-8 win for Cleveland that took 13 innings — is one of the very best baseball games of this century, and contained this clip, which I would watch if I ever needed to summon the strength to lift a two-story home from its foundation.
7. 2011 – Cardinals Beat Phillies 3-2
On paper, the 2011 Phillies had everything. This was the fabled Four Aces team, and those four — Roy Halladay (twice), Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt — made every start of this series. The offense still had its championship core intact as well, even if they were aging. Ryan Madson had an excellent year filling in for the injured Brad Lidge as the team’s primary closer, and on top of that, these Phils were battle tested, having participated in each of the previous four Octobers.
What they didn’t account for was the little guys.
Skip Schumaker and Ryan Theriot were as much of a reason the Cardinals won this series as their Hall of Fame teammates were. While Albert Pujols hit .350 and Yadier Molina threw out three would-be basestealers while masterfully guiding Cardinals pitchers through the vaunted Phillies lineup, Schumaker and Theriot combined to go 12-for-20 with four doubles and four RBI. The biggest of those RBI came in the decisive Game 5, when Schumaker flicked the 10th pitch of his first at-bat off Halladay into the right field corner. It wound up being the only run of the game.
That game is seared into the Delaware Valley’s collective memory for many reasons, the biggest two being Chris Carpenter bullying the Phillies all night en route to a complete game shutout, and Ryan Howard tearing his Achilles in the game’s final at-bat, which was the definitive and unfortunate end to that run of good fortune in Philadelphia. But that game was also one of three one-run affairs in this highly competitive series, including a Game 2 where the Cardinals clawed back from an early 4-0 deficit to beat Lee, and a nailbiter Game 3 where neither team scored until Ben Francisco lifted a pinch-hit homer in the seventh.
Apart from an 11-6 Phillies win to start the series, every game of this tilt was a box office spectacle.
6. 1997 – Cleveland Beats Yankees 3-2
The defending-champion Yankees squared off against Cleveland, with both teams right in the teeth of their ’90s revitalization. They were kind enough to only play bangers.
In Game 1 in the Bronx, the visitors jumped David Cone for five runs in the first inning, only to turn around and watch their bullpen give the Yankees five right back in the sixth. It wasn’t any ordinary offensive explosion either; the Yanks went back-to-back-to-back, marking the first time that had ever happened in a postseason game. If you like watching videos of old Yankee Stadium going ham, I highly recommend pressing play.
Cleveland roughed up Andy Pettitte to steal Game 2, but then lost Game 3 at home, setting up two win-or-go-home games. Because of the playoff format of the time, those were both in Cleveland, and while we will never be able to quantify home field advantage, the hometown nine did take both of them by exactly one run. In Game 4, Cleveland was four outs from elimination when Sandy Alomar Jr. took Mariano Rivera deep in the eighth and Omar Vizquel walked it off in the ninth.
To this day, Blue Jays-Rangers in 2015 is the series that felt the most like drugs. The energy from pre-renovation Rogers Centre was palpable through the television screen, and rightfully so. This was the Blue Jays’ first taste of October baseball since winning the title in 1993, and their berth in the postseason broke the longest active playoff drought at the time.
Naturally, the Jays lost their first two home games, getting dinked and dunked by Delino DeShields and Hanser Alberto. Game 2 was the real barnburner though, needing 14 innings and 37 total players to complete.
If you’re going to poke holes in this series’ status as an all-timer, it’s because Games 3 and 4 in Texas were relative snoozers. But Game 5 more than made up for them. It was not just a spine tingler, a national exaltation for all of Canada, and the moment that bat flips fully went mainstream thanks to José Bautista’s epic go-ahead home run, but it was also a reminder of what it means to truly be alive (and also that if a catcher throws the ball back to the pitcher and it doinks off the hitter’s bat, that’s still a live ball).
4. 2001 – Diamondbacks Beat Cardinals 3-2
If a series in which every game is decided by three runs or less, the teams alternate wins, and the final swing produces a walk-off hit doesn’t do it for you, this probably just isn’t your jam.
The Diamondbacks won this series despite getting outscored 12-10. They also lost the lone game that Randy Johnson started. The Cardinals, meanwhile, managed to hit a measly .191 for the series and relied heavily on their bullpen, which lacked a true alpha and wasn’t particularly strong in the regular season. Put all that in a blender and you get a weird, gelatinous substance that doesn’t quite feel right but is compelling nonetheless.
One man who was on top of his game was Curt Schilling, who has a case for the best Division Series performance ever. Schilling started two games and went nine innings in both of them, starting with a true masterpiece in Game 1 (nine strikeouts, three hits, zero runs). The encore in Game 5 came with a teensy blemish, but Schilling matched his nine strikeouts and finished with a record-setting 1.30 Win Probability Added for the series. His 18 innings pitched in a Division Series are also a record, and if you’re wondering about that solitary mistake, it was leaving this pitch to J.D. Drew over the plate.
Luckily for the neutral fan, Schilling’s poor location set up Tony Womack’s series-ending floater, foreshadowing more clutchness from him later that postseason.
3. 2003 – Red Sox Beat Athletics 3-2
If you sat down and watched every game of this series today, you’d probably say the worst one was the A’s 5-1 win in Game 2, which was the most lopsided of the series. But that would also mean you just watched Barry Zito twirl seven innings of poetry. Zito’s gem put the Athletics in the driver’s seat but unable to finish the race, as the Red Sox ran off a trio of wins to take the series. First in line to make Oakland slightly less romantic about baseball: Trot Nixon.
The very next day, the A’s lugged a lead into the eighth inning and hitched their wagon to Keith Foulke for the final six outs. He got the first two, then was interrupted by David Ortiz.
The Red Sox took that game in another white knuckler that put a period on an unfathomable streak for the A’s. The green and gold endured four straight ALDS Game 5 losses from 2000-03, with this one marking the second in three years after winning the first two games of the series. Tough for the East Bay baseball fans, cinema (literally and figuratively) for fans of exciting ball. And hey, A’s fans will always have Ramon Hernandez’s bizarre yet effective two-out, walk-off bunt from Game 1.
2. 2013 – Tigers Beat Athletics 3-2
It is not hyperbole at all to say every game of this series had a serotonin spike. If Scherzer and Bartolo Colon duking it out in Game 1 wasn’t enough for you, that game ended with the slimmest of margins as Joaquín Benoit had to slay Brandon Moss and Yoenis Cespedes to close it out. Game 2 was a scoreless tie into the bottom of the ninth — Justin Verlander and Sonny Gray, take a bow — when then-unknown catcher Stephen Vogt spanked a walk-off single. In Game 3, Grant Balfour and Victor Martinez screamed at each other real loud! The Tigers trailed 3-0 in Game 4, then 4-3, and still managed to pull out a win. That game deserves a closer look, because Scherzer came in for a relief outing that was this close to being a complete disaster.
To set the scene, Scherzer relieved Doug Fister in the top of the seventh, with the game knotted at three. Some small ball from the A’s spawned the aforementioned 4-3 lead, but the Tigers got it back in the seventh, partly due to a home run that may or may not have been interfered with.
When Scherzer came out for the eighth, he proceeded to load the bases with nobody out, grit his way to two massive strikeouts, then run the count full to Alberto Callaspo, who laced a line drive that hung up just long enough to be caught. It really was an absolute powder keg of a baseball game.
Game 5 was more tyranny from Verlander, who was just torturous to the A’s. At this point we’ll stop highlighting Oakland’s shortcomings and focus on Verlander, who is one of five pitchers to post a 0.00 ERA in an LDS while tossing at least 10 innings.
1. 1995 – Mariners Beat Yankees 3-2
I don’t need to explain why this series is paramount to the Seattle Mariners’ very existence, or how Ken Griffey Jr. chugging around the bases to win Game 5 is surely the best that any baseball player has ever looked while running.
What maybe does need explaining is everything that led to Edgar Martinez’s picturesque swing and The Kid’s wild ride. Like how Griffey (maybe the most beloved player the Mariners have ever employed) uncorked two home runs off David Cone in Game 1, only for reliever Bobby Ayala (maybe the least beloved player the Mariners have ever employed) to later serve up three runs that essentially sealed Seattle’s loss. Perhaps you were unaware that Vince Coleman and his .345 career slugging percentage hit a tater in Game 2, a sordid evening in the Bronx that lasted over five hours, culminating in Jim Leyritz’s walk-off dinger that nearly killed professional baseball in Seattle.
The Mariners bounced back to win a fun Game 3 and had to overcome a five-run deficit to survive Game 4. While Martinez’s legacy is tied to The Double in Game 5, the M’s aren’t even in that position if not for his less-heralded handiwork the day before. It is a marvel of human accomplishment that he kept the first one fair.
Game 5 was one for the books. While the heroics of both Martinez and Griffey are deserving of their own 20,000 words, and are the main reason why this series gets the top spot, let’s continue the education around the other parts of that legendary Sunday at the Kingdome.
Cone unleashed a legitimately reckless 147 pitches, the Yankees finished with six hits but 10 walks, and a rookie setup man named Rivera made his third straight scoreless appearance on his way to leading all pitchers in WPA for the series.
They were five close, high-scoring games that could never be replicated, have been slightly imitated, but are now forever vindicated with the top spot on this list.
After cruising through the NLDS with a gentleman’s sweep, the defending-champion Los Angeles Dodgers are headed to the National League Championship Series for the third year in a row. A day after Yoshinobu Yamamoto silenced Atlanta’s bats in Game 3, the Braves and Dodgers ran out the finest Tylers they had to offer, and both pitchers excelled. The difference largely came down to the bullpens. With a bevy of rested options to choose from, Dave Roberts went and got his pitchers at the first sign of trouble. In contrast, Walt Weiss, who ran a bullpen game in Game 2 and needed four innings from his ‘pen in Game 3, stretched his pitchers a bit further than they could manage, and although it took seven innings, he finally paid for it. The Dodgers took the game 4-1 and the series 3-1. They now await the winner of the Brewers/Padres series in the NLCS, but you have to imagine they’re not too worried either way.
If you were the Braves, you might have circled Tyler Glasnow’s start on the postseason calendar. This Dodgers rotation has about as many soft spots as the four horseman of the apocalypse, but Glasnow missed much of the season with back spasms, hadn’t pitched in 13 games, and had underperformed his peripherals in a major way. Since he returned from the IL, Glasow had run an excellent 2.14 FIP because he was striking out nearly 13 batters per nine, but his ERA was an unsightly 4.46. When your other options are Yamamoto, Tarik Skubal, and Blake Snell, you’ll take it.
The Braves manufactured the first run of the game. More specifically, leadoff man Michael Harris II manufactured it almost single-handedly. Glasnow started Harris with a 96-mph fastball right at the top of the zone, and Harris was all over it, shooting a low liner through the right side of the infield at 107 mph. With basestealing guru Antoan Richardson in the first base coaching box, Harris got out to a huge vault lead and easily stole second base two pitches later. He could have had third as well, but he didn’t see Will Smith’s throw continue into center field. Harris made it there eventually, advancing on a Matt Olson groundout. Three pitches later, Glasnow spiked a 1-1 curveball to Ozzie Albies, and Harris didn’t hesitate for a second. He broke as soon as he read the pitch’s downward angle. It bounced well in front of the plate, and Smith did well to block the high bounce, but he couldn’t keep it close. Harris scored easily. With their season on the line, the Braves had a 1-0 lead. Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks in part to their offense’s listless performance against a parade of six Braves pitchers — Atlanta’s second bullpen game in a row — the Dodgers squandered a chance to take a 2-0 Division Series lead on Sunday, lending extra urgency to their matchup against Chris Sale in Tuesday’s Game 3. Manager Dave Roberts shook up his lineup in ways both foreign and familiar, most notably dropping Shohei Ohtani in the batting order below the two-hole for his first time as a Dodger, in hopes it would lead to a better approach by the banged-up, slumping slugger. Additionally, Roberts called upon old hands Enrique Hernández and Miguel Rojas, as much for their intensity as for the platoon advantages they provided against the ace lefty. Not all of those moves had a direct impact, but one certainly did, as Hernández broke a scoreless tie with a two-run homer off Sale in the fourth inning. Backed by seven strong innings from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers eked out a 3-1 victory, positioning them to clinch the series on Wednesday.
Through the first two games, Ohtani had gone 2-for-8 with a pair of strikeouts out of the no. 2 spot behind Mookie Betts, with a single in each game and three hard-hit balls in all. Roberts dropped him to fifth behind Betts, Freddie Freeman, Teoscar Hernández, and Will Smith — the first time Ohtani had started a game batting lower than fourth since 2020, when he was Angel. I’ll explore the numbers below, but the move made particular sense given Ohtani’s sudden struggles against sliders, Sale’s forte. Elsewhere, Roberts swapped out switch-hitting Tommy Edman at second base in favor of Rojas, batting sixth, and in place of lefty-swinging Max Muncy, he inserted the righty-swinging Hernández at third base, batting him ninth. Ohtani aside, the lineup resembled the one the Dodgers used when they — including Yamamoto — squared off against Sale on August 27 in Atlanta; Hernández played third, and Rojas second, with Edman in center in place of the injured Andy Pages. The Dodgers lost that one, 1-0, as Sale tossed a five-hit, 11-strikeout shutout, with Rojas the only one of the aforementioned moving parts to collect a hit.
Muncy merely ranked second on the team this year in both wRC+ (129) and homers (29), and what’s more, he homered in each of the first two games of the NLDS, running his franchise record for postseason dingers to 18. Coming off one of his best seasons against same-side pitching — .261/.343/.504 (133 wRC+) in 134 plate appearances against lefties, compared to .249/.349/.485 (126 wRC+) in 427 plate appearances against righties — this wasn’t a benching to be taken lightly. Hernández’s small-sample numbers against lefties during an injury-shortened season (.176/.236/.333, 50 wRC+ in 55 PA) didn’t exactly strengthen the case, nor did his 81 wRC+ against lefties over the past three seasons, compared to 75 against righties. Read the rest of this entry »
Sunday night’s encore performance of the Ray Kerr Variety Hour felt like a turning point in this postseason. The Braves had not only survived the Chris Salebullpen fiasco, they were headed back home with the series tied and their two best starting pitchers lined up on full rest. The Dodgers have been on the ropes before during their back-to-back World Series-winning run, but those ropes felt especially menacing against Sale and the resurgent Braves.
Not to worry, Dodgers fans. Los Angeles escaped this crucible with a 3-1 win, and now sit one game from a third straight NLCS appearance. Regularly scheduled programming has resumed. Read the rest of this entry »
Heading into Game 2 of the NLDS, much of the talk was of the mismatch in pitching rotations between the Dodgers and the Braves, and whether Atlanta’s bullpen could continue to cover up for a rotation held together with rubber bands and duct tape. Yet, in the end, it was the Dodgers who ended up burning the most relievers, and the denouement was only in doubt because the Braves missed a few opportunities to blow the game, a 3-2 win, wide open.
The most-talked-about pitching decision was probably the one made before the game started: Going with a third consecutive bullpen game rather than starting ace Chris Sale in Game 2. It’s a decision that Walt Weiss clearly doesn’t regret, at least not when speaking in public. He told reporters:
“We had a conversation this morning. Look, at the end of the day, we want full-strength Chris Sale. I know him at 80 percent is really good, but that’s what it came down to. We’ve given him extra rest all year, and it’s served him very well. It allowed him to do what he did the other night, I think all the extra rest he’d gotten. He’d be on normal rest from his last start, but he had the outing in between. Not sure you’re getting the best version of him pitching today. We’re certain he will pitch in Game 3.
Remember that brief period of time when Tarik Skubal didn’t look like Tarik Skubal? In June, in his first three starts after returning from tiny-needle surgery, Skubal went 0-2 with a 4.96 ERA and a 5.86 FIP. He struck out as many batters as ever, but he just kept giving up home runs, and everyone whispered to their neighbors with alarm, “Maybe the needle wasn’t as tiny as we thought it was. Is it possible that it was just a regular needle with a good publicist?” Well, that period of time was shorter than you might remember. It was, in fact, just 12 days long. Over his final 16 starts, Skubal regained his form. He went 9-3 with a 2.36 ERA and a 2.14 FIP. Only once over that period did he allow even four runs in a start.
With Game 1 of the NLDS in the books, Skubal has extended that unhittable stretch to 17 starts. Under an oppressively hot midday sun in Los Angeles, the Dodgers quashed the Braves by a score of 5-3. The game started out looking like a pitcher’s duel, spent a few innings looking like it might be a rout, and ended up surprisingly close. All eight runs scored by way of the home run. Skubal was brilliant, striking out seven, walking two, and allowing two hits across six innings. At one point he retired 15 Braves in a row. The effort allowed him to lower his career postseason ERA of 2.04 even further. With a 1-0 series lead, the Dodgers have rounded into form, and the two-time defending champs look every bit the juggernaut we expected back in the spring. Read the rest of this entry »
