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 »

Once considered the natural successor to Clayton Kershaw as The Man in the Dodgers’ rotation, Walker Buehler’s career hit a rocky stretch in 2022. Coming off arguably his best season in the majors, Buehler was pulled from a June start with elbow pain, starting a journey that ended with a Tommy John surgery, the second of his career, two months later. After some unrelated injury setbacks this spring, Buehler returned to the Dodgers, but as a shadow of his former self. He finished 2024 with a 5.38 ERA and a 5.54 FIP, and might not have even made the postseason roster if not for the fact that most of the organization’s other plausible starters don’t currently have working throwing arms. His no-strikeout, six-run outing against the Padres in Game 3 of the NLDS wasn’t an inspiring sign that he’d turn things around in the playoffs.

And yet, in Game 3 of the NLCS against the Mets at Citi Field, Buehler had opposing batters flailing at his shockingly nasty repertoire in a short but effective four-inning start. He left with a two-run lead, but after the Los Angeles offense kept tacking on and the bullpen threw five scoreless innings, the Dodgers left the ballpark Wednesday night with an 8-0 win and a 2-1 advantage in the best-of-seven series.

One of the problems with Buehler in his return this year was that he was just so darn hittable at times. Before 2022, his four-seamer was the foundation that his out-pitches were built around, but even before his elbow surgery, the effectiveness of the pitch had practically disappeared. From 2021 to 2022, he bled about 200 rpm off his fastball’s average spin rate. Batters apparently took notice, suddenly slugging .618 as his heater lost some of its rise. Buehler returned from surgery, but the four-seamer’s effectiveness did not, and the pitch became a smaller part of his toolset. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Saturday, the Arizona Fall League played host to a tripleheader, with start times staggered enough to see at least most of all three contests at the various ballparks in the eastern part of the Phoenix metro area. My notes and thoughts on the standouts from that day, as well as Monday’s solo game in Peoria, are below. You can find the end-of-year reports and grades on the 2024 Fall Leaguers on the Fall League tab of The Board. Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — In early May, Ben Casparius struck out seven Springfield Cardinals over 5.1 scoreless innings, leading the Double-A Tulsa Drillers to a dominant 11-0 victory. Five months later, he was ripping filthy sliders to close out Game 1 of the NLCS for one of the richest teams in the sport.

This is life in the Dodgers bullpen at the moment. After a cursed season for injuries, one where they’ve deployed Plans A, B, C, and D, their Plan E involves a trio of talented-but-unproven arms picking up more innings than Dodgers manager Dave Roberts would like. At points, it has worked out incredibly well — the Dodgers ripped off 33 consecutive scoreless innings between the end of the NLDS and the start of the NLCS, tying a postseason record. But yesterday’s Game 2 revealed the downside of relying on Evan Phillips, Blake Treinen, Michael Kopech, and a bevy of backup options. The designed bullpen game went off the rails early, as the Mets put up six runs in the first two innings and cruised for the remainder of the contest.

Out of necessity, the Dodgers have thrust pitchers like Casparius into the spotlight. According to RosterResource, the Dodgers currently have seven starting pitchers on the injured list, including Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, and Dustin May. That list does not include Bobby Miller, who was slated to be a big part of the rotation in April but was demoted to Oklahoma City in September after struggling with various maladies all year. It doesn’t include Shohei Ohtani, who is still rehabbing from elbow surgery. And it doesn’t include Alex Vesia, Michael Grove, Joe Kelly, or Brusdar Graterol, all off the postseason roster due to injuries suffered in the last few weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

The magic of baseball is that every pitch counts and no game is ever truly over. There’s no victory formation, no garbage time with two minutes left in a 30-point blowout. If you have outs left, you can string together hits ad nauseam and win the game. But while that’s technically true, the game doesn’t really work that way in practice. Most games boil down to a few key moments, where the stakes are heightened and the outcome is truly uncertain. Win those moments, and you generally win the game.

In Game 2 of the NLCS on Monday, there were three such moments. You could use leverage index to tell you that. You could also just watch the game and count when there were a lot of runners on. The Mets won 7-3 to even the series at one game each, but if those three moments had broken differently, the game could have too.

The first inflection point in the game came early. The Dodgers went with a modified version of their plan from last Wednesday: a Ryan Brasier-fronted bullpen game. Landon Knack came in for the second inning this time, which makes sense to me as an armchair manager. The Dodgers were going to need at least one less-trusted reliever to throw, because Alex Vesia got hurt in Game 5 of the NLDS and was left off the roster for this series, and Daniel Hudson apparently wasn’t even available on Monday. Why not get Knack in early, against the bottom half of the Mets lineup, and see whether he had it or not? A scoreless outing would set the Dodgers up to aim high-leverage options at the top of the New York order the rest of the day. A bad outing? They could pull the ripcord and keep everyone fresh. Better to find that out in the second inning than the seventh.
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LOS ANGELES — There was a glint in the eye of Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. Asked in the pregame press conference if his Game 1 starter, Jack Flaherty, would be making any adjustments after an unsteady start against the Padres in the NLDS, Roberts vamped for a bit before a grin broke across his face.

“I just feel he’s built for moments like this,” Roberts said. “I think the pulse, the stuff. I really feel a good one out of Jack tonight.”

Whether it was a premonition, insider knowledge, or — in the style of his fellow Angelenos — belief in his power to manifest reality, Roberts got exactly what he expected. Flaherty carried the Dodgers in Game 1 of the NLCS on Sunday night, shutting out the Mets for seven innings en route to a casual 9-0 victory and an early series lead.

The right-hander, acquired from Detroit in a trade deadline deal, was in control all night. He allowed two walks and two singles but otherwise held the Mets at bay, striking out six and holding New York to an .233 expected batting average. It felt like the Mets couldn’t figure out whether to sit on Flaherty’s loopy knuckle curve or his firmer gyro slider. Stuck between these two distinct breaking balls, the Mets flailed around, swinging through his breakers, lifting them for harmless fly balls, or — on the rare occasions when they squared him up — sending them straight into the gloves of the Dodgers defense. To right-handed hitters, Flaherty threw a near-identical number of curves and sliders, making it difficult to key in on a specific pitch type. Read the rest of this entry »