The wild card round is already short enough, and this year, all four matchups ended in sweeps. That’s not much postseason baseball for the Rays, Blue Jays, Brewers, and Marlins. Suffice it to say, none of those teams took October, despite what the t-shirts promised.

While I feel a twinge of heartache for the losing side in any postseason matchup, I feel especially bad for the first-round exits. After a 162-game slog with the playoffs as the only goal, their season is over in the blink of an eye. With time, some will be forgotten as contenders entirely. That seems a shame, considering how well each of these teams performed in the regular season.

With that in mind, I wanted to take one last moment to recognize the playoff performances of Miami, Milwaukee, Toronto, and Tampa Bay, before the winds of the postseason blow on to the Division Series matchups. To be clear, there isn’t a ton to celebrate; they were each swept, after all. Still, every eliminated team had at least one player whose postseason showing deserves a pat on the back. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to rank each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Coverage of the Twins’ sweep of the Blue Jays focused on Carlos Correa’s crafty veteran playoff leadership, but Royce Lewis, Pablo López, and Jhoan Duran were key parts of Minnesota’s victory too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Correa is important because he’s a great player and great leader, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Yesterday, I covered the two American League teams that lost in the first round. Today, it’s the senior circuit’s turn. Read the rest of this entry »

I guess we statistically inclined writers aren’t technically supposed to believe in momentum. At least, we’re not supposed to believe it’s measurable or predictive. In baseball as in physics, the trajectory of events can be altered in the blink of an eye. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the moment momentum changes. Not so here.

On Wednesday night, Aaron Nola followed up Zack Wheeler’s Game 1 masterpiece with seven scoreless innings of his own. The Phillies got to Braxton Garrett early and broke the game open with a late Bryson Stott grand slam. Final score: 7-1. Time to crank the Tiësto remix of Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing On My Own,” play the video of Harry Kalas singing “High Hopes,” and hop on a plane to Atlanta for the NLDS.

It looked very, very easy, even by the standards of a two-game sweep, but it was not preordained. Needing one win to clinch the series, the Phillies were presented with two obvious chances to seize control of the game. They grabbed both without hesitation. Read the rest of this entry »

Extremes in defense were on display as the Wild Card round kicked off on Tuesday afternoon. In the Rangers-Rays opener, Texas left fielder Evan Carter laid out for a great catch of an Isaac Paredes line drive in the first inning, starter Jordan Montgomery dove to make an impressive snag of Jose Siri’s popped-up bunt in the second, and Josh Jung made a nice grab on Manuel Margot’s soft liner in the seventh. On the other side, Siri’s day from hell continued as he missed catching Corey Seager’s wall-banging double in the fifth, then deflected and briefly lost control of a Seager bloop before airmailing it over third base in the sixth, costing the Rays a run. And misery loves company — his Rays teammates made three additional errors in their 4-0 loss.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, center fielder Michael A. Taylor made a pair of exceptional catches, and Carlos Correa saved a run in the fourth by fielding a dribbler that had gone under third baseman Jorge Polanco’s glove, making a sidearm throw home while on the run to keep Bo Bichette from scoring. Read the rest of this entry »

When I laid out a potential path to a Marlins upset in the NL Wild Card Series, it started with Jesús Luzardo hanging with Zack Wheeler. The 33-year-old righty has been one of the best starters in baseball over his tenure with the Phillies, whose run to last year’s pennant was in large part the result of a procession of dominant Wheeler starts. But Luzardo is an excellent pitcher himself; perhaps a player of his youth and talent could raise his game in the biggest start of his life.

Luzardo didn’t pitch badly by any means, but on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, there was simply no hanging with Wheeler. I’ll list his stats here, but they don’t do the performance justice: 6.2 innings, five hits, no walks, one run, eight strikeouts. The Phillies won, 4–1, and now have a stranglehold on a series they were heavily favored to win from the start.

“I think the story was Wheeler,” said Marlins manager Skip Schumaker. “He was excellent tonight. The sinker/sweeper combination gave us trouble. A lot of weak ground ball contact…. He was just excellent.” Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the novelties we’re going to see this postseason, this series is one of the weirdest. The Phillies and Marlins have never met in the postseason before. In fact, they’d never made the playoffs in the same season before; apart from a stretch from 2003 to ’09 when it seemed like they only ever played each other, the two franchises had never even finished above .500 in the same season before.

But here we are: Three games to determine who gets eternal claim to the legacy of Darren Daulton and Alex Arias, and more importantly, a berth in the NLDS against Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start on Tuesday, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its American League counterpart, which will run tomorrow, will break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott isn’t just what you get when you put James McAvoy under a UV lamp.

Okay, now I have to pretend this entire article was more than a flimsy pretext to make that joke. Here goes.

Scott has been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this season, and an unlikely linchpin to Miami’s persistent postseason challenge. The headline numbers look pretty good for Scott: 9-5 with nine saves, a 2.44 ERA, a 2.32 FIP (second among relievers behind Félix Bautista and Matt Brash), 2.4 WAR (second to Bautista) and a 32.7% strikeout rate. But because of where Scott plays, his performance means even more than what it looks like. Read the rest of this entry »

Just in case Max Scherzer’s season-ending injury wasn’t enough pitcher-specific tragedy for the week, baseball’s deities have handed down a tale of woe to another of the game’s top pitchers. Sandy Alcantara, last year’s NL Cy Young award winner, may miss the remainder of the season as well. While you could argue that teammate Jesús Luzardo has surpassed Alcantara as a top-of-the-rotation weapon, Alcantara’s history as one of the NL’s top workhorses makes his absence extremely ill-timed for the Marlins, who are currently fighting for their playoff lives against the Diamondbacks, Reds, and Giants.

Alcantara first landed on the IL about a week ago after experiencing discomfort in his forearm. Baseball people take forearm pain as seriously as the denizens of Middle-earth regard inscribed poems on mysterious rings, so Alcantara was shut down for further diagnosis. While he felt healthy enough to play catch on Wednesday, an MRI revealed that his forearm strain stems from a sprained UCL. While the worst-case scenario — namely, a Tommy John surgery that would cost him the rest of this season and likely all of 2024 — does not appear to be the immediate course of action, his 2023 status remains uncertain. When asked specifically about Alcantara’s return, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker avoided being too bullish on the prospects of getting him back this year, saying, “I don’t know. I can’t say yes. I can’t say no. I’ve just gotta be positive. I just gotta keep telling myself day by day and try to take advantage of the opportunity.”

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize Alcantara as having a rough season — I think something like Alek Manoah’s disastrous 2023 better fits that bill — but I can’t deny that it’s been a bit disappointing compared to his 2022. This year, Alcantara has posted his highest ERA as a Marlin, as well as his highest home run allowed rate and lowest strikeout rate. He’s been hit harder than usual, so none of these numbers are pure flukes. But while Statcast’s xERA isn’t happy about his season, ZiPS sees him as have a 3.60 zFIP, reflecting that the declines in his strikeout rate don’t quite match the smaller declines seen in his plate discipline data. It would be hard to say he’s been an ace this year, but the fact that Alcantara is able to eat so many innings has kept his value strong, and he was likely headed for his third-straight season of 200 innings and at least 3 WAR. The Marlins have a young rotation and many of their pitchers have significant injury histories. That makes it extra nice to have one of baseball’s dwindling number of pitchers who can casually go seven innings most nights.

In losing Scherzer, ZiPS estimated that the Rangers lost two percentage points in the playoff race and 0.4 percentage points in World Series probability. ZiPS likes Alcantara slightly better as a pitcher and feels more confident about the replacement options in Texas, so the impact on Miami’s fate is a skosh larger. First, I ran ZiPS assuming that Alcantara would miss the rest of the season:

If we ignore the Padres, who are on the verge of rounding to zero, the Marlins have the toughest road of any of the Wild Card contenders without Alcantara. Now, let’s assume the Marlins get one of those aforementioned Tolkienian rings, use its little-known power to heal elbow and forearm problems, and get Alcantara back into the rotation when he’s eligible on Tuesday:

In a very tight race, getting Alcantara back for a couple starts is still enough to snag the Marlins nearly four percentage points of playoff probability, about twice what a healthy Scherzer would have done for the Rangers. And as importantly, having him for the playoffs would change the top of the rotation enough to give Miami a much better chance of making a deep postseason run.

Naturally, the worst-case scenario would have a significant effect on Alcantara’s long-term outlook:

While the odds still favor Alcantara returning, if worst came to worst, there would be a lot of concerns. Would Alcantara’s changeup still be as devastating if he came back with a 95 mph fastball instead of a 98 mph one? Would the loss of an entire year reduce the chances of him finally finding the strikeout upside of his solid stuff, as Nathan Eovaldi eventually did? What are the chances he could return and still be one of the few pitchers who’s a good bet to throw 200 innings?

Thankfully, we’re not yet at the point where we have to answer those questions. Mason Miller suffered an UCL sprain in May, but has been able to come back with conservative treatment thanks to the A’s showing an abundance of caution in terms of hurrying him back. But if Alcantara’s 2023 is indeed over, the Marlins face a tougher path to the playoffs, certainly a tougher one than when both ZiPS and the FanGraphs playoff odds had them with an over 70% chance of making the playoffs back in July.

I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »