The bill for using Max Scherzer to close out Game 5 of the Division Series against the Giants has come due. On Saturday afternoon, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts announced that he would again use Corey Knebel as the opener in Game 1 of the Championship Series against the Braves, presumably to give Scherzer — who threw 13 pitches in closing out the Giants, earned his first career save, and indicated his intent to “party hard” in celebration afterwards — an extra day of rest before his NLCS start, a move that bumps Walker Buehler and Julio Urías back one game as well.

Prior to Game 5, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of the possibility of using Scherzer, “He’s ready for whatever we need. Obviously the most important thing is to win tonight. But we still have to think about when and if we fire that bullet there is a cost, and we have to weigh other options as far as guys we already have in particular roles who have thrived.”

With Knebel and Brusdar Graterol each pitching scoreless (but hardly adventure-free) innings ahead of Urías on Thursday, the Giants emptied their bench early in order to gain the platoon advantage, but were left with righty Wilmer Flores — who was 0-for-17 with eight strikeouts in his career against Scherzer to that point — batting with two outs in the ninth. He struck out, aided by first base umpire Gabe Morales‘ dubious strike three call on a checked swing. Knebel will again open, and Roberts has indicated that Tony Gonsolin, who has not pitched since September 30, will figure prominently in a bulk role.

From the standpoint of our ZiPS Postseason Game-By-Game Odds, the overall cost is negligible thanks to the quality of the Dodgers’ pitching. The swing in the odds of the individual games appears somewhat steep in spots as the Dodgers reshuffle their rotation, with the Braves’ decision to pitch Ian Anderson in Games 2 and 6 (if necessary) and Charlie Morton in Games 3 and 7 (if necessary) nudging the needle as well:

Max Fried’s Game 1 assignment and the Braves’ use of some kind of bullpen configuration for Game 4 were thus the only constants for either side. Still, it all comes out in the wash, moving the overall series odds by less than 1%:

When the postseason began, a rematch of the 2020 National League Championship Series only had about a 21% chance of happening, according to our Playoff Odds. But after some particularly unlikely occurrences — not just the lower seeds advancing in the Division Series — here we are. Freddie Freeman became the first lefty to hit a homer off Josh Hader in nearly 13 months, and the first to do so on a slider in more than two years, while lifting the Braves past the Brewers in Game 4. The Dodgers won the Wild Card game via a walkoff home run by a slumping Chris Taylor and then eked out a narrow victory over the 107-win Giants in similarly heart-stopping fashion, with the winning hit in Thursday night’s Game 5 delivered by Cody Bellinger on the heels of a nightmare season. That’s baseball, Suzyn.

Unlike last year, this time around the Braves will have home-field advantage despite winning 18 fewer regular season games than the Dodgers, because the current playoff format deals a stiff penalty to teams sneaking into the postseason via the Wild Card door. Atlanta’s advantage could be significant at some point in the series, particularly if it goes past five games, but it’s worth noting the Braves went just 42-38 at home, tying the Marlins for the NL’s 10th-highest win total in that split; meanwhile, their 46-35 road record ranked fourth in the NL. The Dodgers had the best home record (58-23) and third-best road record (48-33), and just won an elimination game (and two of their three Division Series games) in enemy territory. The talent gap between the two teams probably matters more than the venue in which they meet, though in a short series… you know the rest. Read the rest of this entry »

A pizza stain on the new Armani. A chocolate chip cookie, fresh out of the oven, adorned with nine chips and one cat droplet. The middle five wishes of Elliot Richards. Game 5 of the 2021 NLDS.

The Dodgers won 2-1 in as tense and dramatic a contest as we’ve seen all year, one that ended with an inexplicable call from first base umpire Gabe Morales on Wilmer Flores’ check swing. For Los Angeles, it’s a fifth trip to the NLCS in six seasons, a triumph only made sweeter by the circumstances. In vanquishing their rivals, the Dodgers get the last laugh in a brilliantly played season series. Tonight’s game is vindication for Dave Roberts and his lineup choices, redemption for Cody Bellinger, and another line on Hall of Famer Max Scherzer’s remarkable resume. Fans of all stripes were treated to an exquisite contest in nearly every respect.

But like most neutrals, that last pitch is stuck in my craw. With two outs, Kris Bryant on first, and Flores at the plate, Scherzer fired a 1-2 slider. Flores started his swing but appeared to check it well in advance of the imaginary and arbitrary breaking point at which a take (usually!) becomes a swinging strike:

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Tonight, there’s only one game in town, as the Giants face the Dodgers in a winner-take-all, NLDS Game 5 slugfest in San Francisco. It’s been billed as a matchup between two borderline Cy Young candidates: Logan Webb, who humbled the Los Angeles lineup in the first game of the series, and Julio Urías, who started Game 2 for the Dodgers after a superlative 2021 season. Only, nope:

Corey Knebel will start Game 5 tonight.

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) October 14, 2021

This isn’t going to be a lengthy discussion of whether openers make sense. Teams clearly like the tactic as a way to fill innings, but almost never in front of a pitcher as good as Urías. I’m interested in what the Giants will do to counter it, and how that counter will determine Urías’s matchups.

When he took the mound last Saturday, the Giants set up like so:

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One of Dodgers’ biggest moves in last night’s must-win Game 4 came long before the players took the field, when Dave Roberts announced that he would start Walker Buehler on short rest rather than turn to Tony Gonsolin. It was a gamble necessitated by losing an extremely tight Game 3 to fall behind 2-1 in the best-of-five NLDS. Gabe Kapler, for his part, opted to stick to the script of starting Anthony DeSclafani, leaving Game 1 hero Logan Webb waiting in the wings for a potential Game 5. Let’s examine how those decisions played out.

The Early Innings

From the jump, Buehler proved he was up to the task in his first career start on short rest, not looking anything like a diminished version of himself. His velocity was up a full tick, and he worked quickly while hitting his spots.

DeSclafani, on the other hand, was unable to hold serve. His slider-heavy evening (50% usage on the night after 36% during the season) had the Dodgers sitting on the pitch. Their aggressive approach paid off; they swung at four of the first five sliders they saw, which led to three line drives and a quick 1-0 lead. The damage was limited to just the one run, as DeSclafani moved off his slider to strike out Justin Turner and end the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

It was windy in Los Angeles on Monday night. Not your garden-variety baseball wind — the kind that might turn a fly ball in the gap into a home run or vice versa. This was gnarly wind, blow-gigantic-human-being-Max-Scherzer-over wind:

That kind of wind can turn anyone’s control scattershot, and it appeared to weigh on Scherzer early. He labored through a 25-pitch first, frequently pushing the ball gloveside — three full counts, a blistered line drive single, and a walk, but also three strikeouts.

Alex Wood looked equally affected in the first. He threw a clean inning, but some of his sinkers sailed sideways, and the odd pitch darted strangely down as if pushed by an invisible hand (shout out to the Adam Smith fans out there). A game matching the two best teams in baseball, with a commanding 2-1 series lead in the balance, decided by wind? It’s exactly the kind of nonsense that makes me dislike five-game series.

Luckily, the wind seemed to agree. Though the conditions remained difficult and a steady stream of dust and debris kept the air hazy, both pitchers mastered the elements as the game went on. Scherzer poured on the strikeouts — eight through the first four innings. He stopped walking Giants hitters, too, and even stopped wasting pitches: after that strenuous 25-pitch first, he needed only 37 pitches to navigate the next three innings. Read the rest of this entry »

When AJ Pollock went down with a Grade 2 right hamstring strain in early September, it wasn’t entirely clear that he would be available to the Dodgers for the postseason, let alone remain as productive as he’d been. Fortunately for Los Angeles, the 33-year-old left fielder made a quick return, hit reassuringly well over the season’s final days — .300/.389/.867 (214 wRC+) in 36 plate appearances post-injury — and is well-positioned to help pick up the slack for the injured Max Muncy, who dislocated his left elbow on the final day of the regular season. In Game 2 of the Division Series against the Giants on Saturday night, the Dodgers’ left fielder played a key role in all three of their rallies.

Pollock, who had taken a pair of 0-for-3s in the NL Wild Card game and the Division Series opener, first made an impact upon Game 2 as part of a move that backfired on the Giants. With two outs and Chris Taylor on second base in the second inning, he got ahead of Kevin Gausman 2-0 by laying off a 95-mph fastball just below the strike zone and then an 85-mph splitter low and away. Rather than challenge him in the zone and risk a big hit, the Giants elected to intentionally walk Pollock, who was batting eighth, to bring up pitcher Julio Urías, a decent hitter who made the Giants pay by driving in the Dodgers’ first run of the series with an RBI single. Pollock took third and then scored on Mookie Betts‘ single.

In the sixth, Cody Bellinger’s bases-loaded, two-run double off reliever Dominic Leone — who taken over for Gausman and made an inauspicious entry by walking Taylor — extended the Dodgers’ lead to 4-1. On Leone’s very next pitch, a slider right on the outside corner, Pollock reached out and lashed it to left field for another two-run double:

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Baseball lends itself to stories, October baseball perhaps most of all. During the regular season, a team’s narrative can unfurl slowly. The postseason, by contrast, is marked by the frantic crowning of heroes and chokers. Subplots abound, and the identity of the game’s central character isn’t always clear until the late innings.

After losing to the San Francisco Giants, 4–0, in Game 1 of the NLDS, the Los Angeles Dodgers hoped to even the series on Saturday. The Giants, for their part, were looking to push the Dodgers to the edge of elimination. In the process, the two teams told three different tales.

The Hero’s Journey, Deferred
If you had told the Giants in June that Kevin Gausman would be starting Game 2 of the NLDS, they would have been thrilled. Heading into the All-Star break, he had posted a 1.73 ERA and a 2.57 FIP, led by a four-seam fastball that finishes batters high and a devilish splitter that wipes them out low and is among the best in the game.

But after a scintillating first half, Gausman faltered. He posted a 4.42 ERA and a 3.65 FIP. His splitter had less sink. He tinkered with his pitch mix, toying with throwing more sliders and what Pitch Info classifies as changeups, though not to particularly great effect. The final month of the season suggested a course correction, though not quite a return to form, an assessment seemingly shared by Gabe Kapler when he tapped Logan Webb to start Game 1 of the series.

And for the first few innings of Saturday’s game, you could see why. Gausman threw first-pitch balls to three of the first four batters he faced. In the second, Chris Taylor doubled. After a Cody Bellinger strikeout, Gausman fell behind AJ Pollock, 2–0, and Kapler opted to put him on intentionally to get to Julio Urías. But the pitcher and his .203 season average slapped a hanging splitter for a single, scoring Taylor; Mookie Betts followed with an RBI single of his own (his third hit this series and fifth this postseason).

It looked like Gausman’s night might end half an inning later, as Kapler almost pinch hit Tommy La Stella for his starter when San Francisco threatened after a Wilmer Flores walk and a Brandon Crawford single. Ultimately, though, he thought better of it when a Donovan Solano sacrifice fly plated a run and pushed the Giants to two outs, and Gausman rewarded that faith by settling down and retiring the next nine batters he faced. It seemed like it might be the sort of start that, provided the Giants rallied, would be described as gritty — not dominant, but necessary in the march to the World Series.

Then the sixth inning hit.

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It took more than a quarter century of Wild Card-era postseason baseball to give us a series between two of the National League’s most iconic franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. The chromatic contrast of both teams’ classic-looking threads, and the tone and intensity of Oracle Park, provided a rich backdrop for a Game 1 Giants victory, a 4-0 contest played with the breakneck pace of a minor league game on getaway day.

Jerry Rice and Steve Young are basically the warm up act here #ResilientSF #NLDS#Postseason pic.twitter.com/V71WpFOUn5

— Kate Rooney (@TheKateRooney) October 9, 2021

The driving force for that pace? Logan Webb, the Giants 24-year-old starter who quickly ushered Dodgers hitters back to the bench in the best start of his young career, hurling 7.2 shutout innings while surrendering just five hits, walking none, and striking out 10. Webb and the Giants have tinkered with his delivery and repertoire a few times over the last three seasons, and they’ve settled on a release point that’s added more sink to his changeup, which has become his best pitch. He threw more changeups in Game 1 than any other offering, inducing 12 of his whopping 21 whiffs on the pitch.

Webb did much of the out-getting work on his own. In addition to striking out 10, a career high, he also collected four Dodgers grounders himself, making him solely responsible for 14 of the 23 outs he induced. Beyond the tallied whiffs, the Dodgers juggernaut lineup had many uncomfortable-looking takes and partial swings against Webb.

All four Giants runs came via the home run, apt considering San Francisco led the big leagues in dingers this season. Buster Posey drew first blood, shooting a 3-0 pitch the opposite way in the first inning. It one-hopped into McCovey Cove and per the broadcast, it was the first home run Walker Buehler has surrendered on a 3-0 pitch during his major-league career (it was only the fourth time Posey has hit a home run in that count).

Both Webb and Buehler coasted through the middle innings. After surrendering a leadoff oppo single to Mookie Betts in the first (Betts went 2-for-4, hitting the single and spanking a hanging Webb slider in the eighth), Webb didn’t allow another hit until the fifth. A couple of harmless singles flecked Buehler’s middle-frames, and neither team did any damage again until the seventh. The few who reached base were quickly erased by great defense. A Webb error that allowed Corey Seager to reach in the fourth was expunged by a gorgeous 4-6-3 double play that saw La Stella and Crawford crisscross around the bag.

It was the fourth inning when Buehler first started to show real cracks. He surrendered a well-struck single to Kris Bryant, who had three hits, including a homer, and took several very comfortable swings against Buehler throughout the night, and then narrowly escaped a would-be double by Mike Yastrzemski, who hooked a cutter just foul down the right field line. With two outs in that situation, Bryant may have scored from first on a double. It took Buehler surprising Yaz with a gutsy full-count changeup, his first cambio of the night, to escape. (An aside: take a look at Buehler’s changeup usage by game this year.) The Giants couldn’t score despite two well-struck balls in play in the fifth: an Evan Longoria fly out and a Tommy La Stella single sandwiched around the pitcher’s spot. Buehler stabilized and moved quickly through the sixth and was left in to face Bryant to start the seventh.

Three-hundred-and-eighty-nine feet later, the Giants had padded their lead to three. Buehler finished having worked 6.1 innings of three-run ball, allowing seven base runners while striking out five. He managed to induce just 12 swinging strikes in 99 total pitches, and his fastball’s spin rate was down a full 200 rpm compared to his 2020 rate.

Webb’s “challenges” came later. He surrendered a two-out double to Seager in the sixth (the hardest-hit ball of the night at 111 mph), and then hung a slider to Will Smith, who also doubled, in the seventh. After each double, Webb struck out hitters until each inning ended. After seven, he had struck out 10 Dodgers on just 77 pitches.

A Brandon Crawford solo shot in eighth — Dodgers reliever Alex Vesia had blown fastballs past the previous two hitters, then left a breaking ball in Crawford’s happy zone — capped the scoring for the Giants.

Dodgers hitters were flummoxed by Webb all night, and four of them tallied multiple strikeouts in Game 1. The bottom of the Dodgers order (Matt Beaty, AJ Pollock, and Cody Bellinger, plus the pitcher’s spot) went 0-for-12, a cakewalk for Giants pitching. Pollock had been super hot, homering five times in the 10 late-September games he played after returning from a hamstring injury, while Beaty is replacing the injured Max Muncy; Bellinger has been mired in a long, concerning funk.

With the benefit of uncharitable hindsight, it might be correct to question Dave Roberts‘ decision to leave Buehler in to face Bryant for a third time. The desire to extend Buehler’s start as long as possible did preserve the Dodgers bullpen for Game 2, though, as none of Los Angeles’ relievers — Brusdar Graterol, Vesia, and Phil Bickford — threw more than 10 pitches in this one, and all should be available tomorrow.

Gabe Kapler was afforded the opportunity to get 24-year-old sidewinder Camilo Doval into his first postseason game with a sizable lead. Doval, who assumed closer duties late in the year, has seemingly “found it” after dealing with stretches of extreme wildness during his minor league career. He’s already one of baseball’s more electric relievers, eliciting ugly swings on his big-bending slider and slinging 100 mph with natural cut right past big league hitters.

Saturday’s Game 2 (9:07 ET) pits Giants righty Kevin Gausman against Dodgers lefty Julio Urías. Both teams, which feature a lot of moving parts, will likely shuffle their lineups. After the game, Roberts told reports that Bellinger will return to first base while Taylor starts in center field. On the Giants side, look for some or all of the right-handed hitting Darin Ruf, Donovan Solano, and Austin Slater to start against Urías. We’ll all watch to see if the Dodgers’ adjustments take, while wishing these two teams could play a seven-game series instead of five.

The Dodgers managed to survive their do-or-die Wild Card matchup against the Cardinals on Wednesday night thanks to the ninth inning heroics of Chris Taylor, setting the stage for the seemingly inevitable clash between the two best teams in baseball in the NL Division Series.

You may have already read that this is the first postseason matchup between these two storied franchises. Since 1995, the first year the Wild Card was implemented, the Dodgers and Giants have made the playoffs in the same season just twice: 2014 and ’16. The success of each team has ebbed and flowed, with one thriving while the other flounders. A new chapter in this historic rivalry will be written this October, with the winner of this series the favorite to claim the National League pennant in the next round.

During the regular season, these two teams were pretty evenly matched. Both won 50 games in the second half. In their head-to-head matchups, San Francisco held the advantage in wins with 10 to Los Angeles’ nine, while the Dodgers scored just two more runs than the Giants in those games. When you break down their rosters into their individual components, these clubs were ranked right next to each other in offense and pitching, with team defense the lone factor separating factor. Read the rest of this entry »