One of the first lessons we learn about life is that it’s rarely fair. Neither the Seattle Mariners nor the Toronto Blue Jays are historical doormats, but both franchises have been plagued over the last three decades by a lack of postseason success, if they reached the playoffs at all.
After the Jays won the 1993 World Series, it was 22 years until they made another postseason. Toronto has a lot of recent October appearances, but finished last in the AL East in 2024 and came into the 2025 playoffs after being swept out of the wild card round in its last three opportunities, including by Seattle in 2022. Aside from that series three years ago, the Mariners have had it even worse: They’ve never won a World Series — never even played in one — and their 2022 postseason appearance snapped a 21-year playoff drought. So the 2025 ALCS is a pretty big deal for both teams, as someone is going to face the Brewers or Dodgers for baseball’s championship. Read the rest of this entry »
Willie MacIver has caught a lot of power arms since entering pro ball in 2018. Some were in Sacramento this season — the 28-year-old University of Washington product spent a chunk of the summer with the Athletics, backing up Shea Langeliers — but none of those hurlers stand out as having the best raw stuff he’s been behind the dish for. That distinction belongs to a former Colorado Rockies farmhand whose brief major-league ledger includes a 22.09 ERA and a 22.7% walk rate over five appearances comprising three-and-a-third innings.
“I caught a guy named Riley Pint,” said MacIver, citing the right-handed flamethrower whom the Rockies drafted fourth overall in 2016 out of an Overland, Kansas high school. “To this day, he has the best stuff I’ve ever seen. I caught him from Low-A all the way through Triple-A, so I was on the ride with him the whole time.”
That ride isn’t necessarily over. Pint is just 27 years old, and while he missed the 2025 season with an injury, the arm is indeed special. MacIver caught him as recently as 2024, and it’s being Pint, and not recent teammate Mason Miller, who he cited speaks volumes.
“When we were in Low-A, it was 102 [mph] all over the place,” MacIver told me. “Then he started throwing a sinker. We were at Driveline together and he was throwing sinkers that were registering as left-handed curveballs on the TrackMan. He could make the ball move like nothing else. His sinker would be like negative-eight, and then he would throw a true sweeper that was Morales-like with the horizontal, but at 87 [mph]. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
The house always wins. In the National League Divisional Series between the Brewers and the Cubs, the home team won every game. Game 5, in which both teams ran out of trusted starters and turned to their bullpens, ended up being the lowest scoring game of the series. The scoring was limited to four solo home runs, and although the Cubs hit 57 more homers than the Brewers during the regular season and two more during this NLDS, the Brewers powered up when it counted. With home runs from William Contreras, Andrew Vaughn, and Brice Turang, they beat the Cubs, 3-1, and will host the Dodgers in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series on Monday.
Just as they’d done during the regular season, the two teams came as close as they possibly could to splitting the series. The Cubs took the regular season series, 7-6, and the Brewers have now taken the Divisional Series, 3-2, leaving the teams tied at nine. The Cubs will return to Chicago and ponder how to improve a roster that now has a massive, Kyle Tucker-shaped hole in the outfield. The Brewers are headed to the Championship Series for the fourth time in franchise history and the first time since 2018, when they lost to the Dodgers. After seven years, they’ll have the chance for revenge.
Although bullpen games involve plenty of mixing and matching, the early plans seemed pretty well scripted. Milwaukee came out of the gate with the big guns, hoping Trevor Megill could be the first pitcher of the entire series to hold the Cubs scoreless in the first inning, before Pat Murphy looked to Jacob Misiorowski for four. After that, the Brewers had the rest of their bullpen ready to match up, thanks to an off day on Friday. “The pitching guys, myself and Matt Arnold, we just sat in a room and just talked about the possibilities and considered a ton of factors,” said Murphy in the pregame press conference. “But we settled on Megill. He’s going to pitch tonight, regardless.” Read the rest of this entry »
SEATTLE — On a per-game basis during the regular season, the Mariners and Tigers both scored and allowed roughly the same number of runs — 4.70 and 4.28, respectively. Through the first four games of the best-of-five ALDS, each team eked out a one-run win and each team triumphed in something of a laugher. Both teams won one game at home and one game on the road, and both teams relied extensively on their bullpens. Heading into Game 5 on Friday night in Seattle, it was clear one team was going to need to do something to distinguish itself. These teams entered the night locked in a dead heat, having played matching hands for much of the series and needing a new strategy, something different to get an edge and break the stalemate, and even then, it required 15 innings and four hours and 58 minutes to do that. When it was all over, the Mariners had outlasted the Tigers, 3-2, on a walk-off single by Jorge Polanco to advance to the American League Championship Series for the first time in 24 years.
“I don’t even know where to begin to try to recap all the heroic efforts that went into today,” manager Dan Wilson said. “And 15 innings? I’ve got to say, I don’t know how the fans kept their energy going. It was unbelievably loud, even in the 15th inning. And this is a special place. T-Mobile Park is a special place, and they showed us that tonight. And just an incredible ballgame from top to bottom.”
Both starting pitchers were taking the mound for a second time in the series, and both brought a slightly different approach to Game 5 than what they put on tape in their prior starts. In Game 1, Seattle starter George Kirby threw his slider 31% of the time; it was the first pitch he threw to eight of the 22 batters he faced. In Game 5, Kirby went to his slider 50% of the time and threw it as the first pitch to 10 of the 18 batters he faced. After the game, he confirmed this was a conscious shift in strategy to show Detroit’s lineup something different from what it’d seen from him six days prior. “All those guys from top to bottom are probably looking for a heater to start,” Kirby said, “and just starting off with a slider, curveball, whatever it may be, just — if I kept them off balance a little bit, I was able to attack the zone a little bit more with my fastball.” By mixing in more sliders early in the count, he was able to maintain the effectiveness of his four-seamer despite the recent exposure. Though the slider-heavy approach meant Kirby racked up fewer strikeouts than usual, he finished his outing allowing just three hits and one earned run over five innings with six punchouts. Read the rest of this entry »
Even the best pitchers in baseball lose a game once in a while. Just ask Tarik Skubal. I’m sure you’ve read about it a hundred times by now, but the Mariners have won all three of their games this year where Skubal was the opposing starter. Seattle was the only team to hand him multiple losses during the regular season, and the Tigers dropped Game 2 of the ALDS — technically a no-decision for Skubal — less than a week ago. Now, thanks to his team’s roaring come-from-behind victory in Game 4, Skubal is lined up to start tonight’s decisive Game 5, giving him an opportunity to finally beat the Mariners this year.
I’ll give a warning upfront: This article is going to lean pretty heavily on batter-pitcher matchup stats; we’ll be examining some extremely small samples. But I think it’s an interesting investigation into the strategy that unfolds between familiar foes during a short postseason series.
What I really wanted to know is whether the Mariners had a specific approach that made them so successful against Skubal this year. As I mentioned, Skubal faced the Mariners twice during the regular season. On April 2, in Seattle, he allowed three runs in 5.2 innings; he gave up six hits and three walks while striking out eight. On July 11, he faced them again, this time in Detroit, and allowed four runs in five innings; he gave up just four hits and two walks while striking out five. His Game 2 start this past Sunday was his best yet: He surrendered two runs on five hits and one walk in seven innings while notching nine strikeouts. The two home runs off the bat of Jorge Polanco were his undoing. Read the rest of this entry »
Ethan Petry Photo: Ken Ruinard/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
A lot of different types of players get sent to the Arizona Fall League by their parent clubs: prospects who have lost time due to injury, org arms there to soak up enough innings for the league to function, guys eligible for the Rule 5 Draft whose teams aren’t yet sold on putting them on the 40-man roster, and, quite often, the most talented and exciting players in minor league baseball. It’s a rich and robust tapestry.
Now that the league’s action has commenced, one use of the AFL is to provide a sort of decontextualized look at some of the players whose strong performance in 2025 was already cause for some re-evaluation. Here’s one player from each AFL roster who arrived with some helium, prompting us to ask if they’ve changed their scouting report, or are just progressively improving into the player we expected.
Glendale Desert Dogs Sam Antonacci, 2B, White Sox 2025 FV: Honorable Mention
Not only did the White Sox trade for Chase Meidroth months after giving Antonacci a slightly over-slot bonus in the fifth round of the 2024 draft, their Double-A Birmingham affiliate won the Southern League while slotting Antonacci in as the third straight feisty little bat-to-ball maven at the top of their lineup behind Rikuu Nishida and William Bergolla. At six feet, he’s a bit taller, but similar to Meidroth, below-average thump and a dearth of the athleticism necessary to drive a shortstop projection cooled early scouting reads for Antonacci, and he was an honorable mention for us on the White Sox list in April. Despite only playing his junior season there after two years of Division II ball, Antonacci is so Coastal Carolina-pilled that 35 hit by pitches form a substantial part of the .433 OBP he held over his first full pro season. (That he has yet to be plunked in his first three AFL games has to be, one would imagine, a source of deep personal disappointment.) Read the rest of this entry »
You may think you’ve already heard enough about Aaron Judge’s heroics during this postseason, especially considering that he wasn’t able to keep his team from getting knocked out barely a week into October. Heroes usually do a more thorough job when saving the day. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about Judge’s 2025 playoff excellence. But I’d argue that you haven’t heard enough, because there’s a bit of context I’d like you to consider. That context? The entirety of postseason history.
Over the course of the American League Divisional Series against the Blue Jays, Judge batted .600. If you factor in his .354 batting average against the Red Sox in the Wild Card round, he batted an even .500 over 31 plate appearances this postseason. Now let’s head over to our handy-dandy postseason leaderboard. If you set a minimum of 30 PAs, you’ll find that Judge just ran the third-highest batting average ever over a single postseason; his .581 on-base percentage is the second highest. His 253 wRC+ is the 14th highest in postseason history (just behind the 255 mark that teammate Giancarlo Stanton put up in 2020). By that standard, Judge just produced one of the greatest postseason performances ever.
Jeez, I thought the Cubs were dead. These guys got torched both games in Milwaukee, then nearly contrived to blow Game 3 after jumping out to a 4-1 first-inning lead.
Game 4 started much the same way for Chicago, with a three-run first-inning homer by Ian Happ, only this time they didn’t let up. Matthew Boyd slung breaking balls around Milwaukee bats for 4 2/3 scoreless innings, and rather than rest on their first-inning output, as they did in Game 3, the Cubs put up a late-inning picket fence to stretch the final score to a serene 6-0. A decisive Game 5 in Milwaukee awaits. Read the rest of this entry »
Man, am I tired of writing about the Dodgers and Phillies. I mean some of that narrowly – this is my second recap of these two financial juggernauts facing off in the past 24 hours, which means I’ve spent more time pondering these two teams than sleeping lately. I mostly mean it broadly, though. We get it, the Dodgers and Phillies are the best two teams in the NL every year. I hear you, they each have a slugging lefty DH who hit 50 homers and has a rabid following. It’s true, they have a former MVP lefty first baseman who departed his longtime NL East team and got a big sack of money for it. Oh, how original, a slight-of-stature righty shortstop who is a dynamic offensive player anyway. A slugging right-handed right fielder who honestly shouldn’t be playing defense? Yup. Endless stacks of pitchers? Sure thing, buddy, nothing but the best for these two.
Maybe it’s my lack of attachment to either team that makes me so tired of seeing them in October. Philadelphia’s “Oh, we’re a bunch of plucky underdogs” act? Exhausting. The Phillies have a $300 million payroll. Dodgers Baseball And Capital Appreciation Corporation employees executing carefully workshopped “dances” to simulate “fun” after base hits? No one’s buying it. But I don’t think it’s just the neutrals. My guess is that even fans of these clubs are sick of it at this point. Everything that annoys you about your opponent in this series is exactly what annoys the rest of us about your team. They even have obnoxious fanbases – not every fan, obviously, but come on, even Dodgers and Phillies partisans will agree with me on this one. Can’t we have someone else?
We can’t, of course. These teams have all the stars! Of course they’re always in the playoffs! And even more confusingly for me, you’re presumably here because you find this series interesting. If you just wanted to know the score, well, they publish those right away. So bear with me. The teams might be overexposed and easy to root against, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a good recap. Just follow Emperor Palpatine’s advice and let the hate flow through you. Read the rest of this entry »
Shutting down the Dodgers offense has been one of the toughest assignments in baseball this October. A series of great opposing pitchers, including Cy Young candidates aplenty, surrendered 27 runs in their first four playoff games. Sure, the Los Angeles pitching has been great too, but you can score on the Dodgers. The difficulty has been with stopping their unending procession of base-clearing prowess.
The Phillies seemed to be well suited to stopping the Dodgers, but that was before Los Angeles won the first two games in Philadelphia. Even worse, the Dodgers sent ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound, so limiting the offense figured to be even more important than normal. That’s too much work for one starter, so Rob Thomson turned to Aaron Nola and Ranger Suárez looking for a tandem performance. As it turned out, that decision was inspired. Along with two Schwarbombs, the Nola-Suárez piggyback propelled the Phillies to an 8-2 win at Dodger Stadium and postponed elimination for at least one more night.
Nola has had a rough year. He missed three months with injury, and looked much diminished when he did pitch en route to posting the worst single-season ERA (6.01) and FIP (4.58) marks of his long, decorated career. He wasn’t in this game for a long time, but he was in it for a good time. He came out absolutely jacked, with his velocity up two to three ticks and a snapping knuckle-curveball that hearkened back to his form of a few years ago. It didn’t click right away – Shohei Ohtani scorched a line drive for an out and then Mookie Betts tripled – but Nola buckled down, blew away Teoscar Hernández with a beautiful curve, and escaped the inning unscathed. He kept it going through a perfect second, perhaps as far as he was ever expected to go. Read the rest of this entry »
