If the Twins were supposed to be a speed bump on the Astros’ familiar path to the World Series, nobody sent them the message, as they got revenge for Game 1’s 6-4 loss with a convincing 6-2 victory that wasn’t even as close as the score. By winning Sunday, the Twins ensure that we’ll finally have at least one series this postseason that isn’t a sweep as the teams head to Target Field for Game 3.

While nearly everyone on the Twins contributed in Game 2, I don’t think many people will disagree with me when I say that this was Pablo López’s game. While he held the Blue Jays to one run in his Wild Card start, I wouldn’t call that outing a dominating performance. This one was. Against the Astros, a better offense than the Jays, López went seven strong innings, striking out seven and allowing six hits. Bill James’ Game Scores might not be a whiz-bang Statcast measure, but I think they do a great job of giving a general feel of starts from a historical, fan perspective, and López’s Game Score ranks very high among Twins’ postseason outings since the Senators moved to Minnesota:

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BALTIMORE — “We need to start taking a little bit of pressure off our pitchers and start scoring earlier in the game,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said before Game 2 of the ALDS against Texas. The previous afternoon, Baltimore had lost a cagey affair, playing from behind most of the way. And despite numerous opportunities, the Orioles never could tie the game back up.

In the bottom of the first inning on Sunday, Hyde’s offense obliged him, stringing together three singles (including an honest-to-God Baltimore chop from Ryan Mountcastle) and a walk to pull in front, 2–0, against the previously unhittable Jordan Montgomery. The Orioles had the lead and the initiative, and the Camden Yards crowd was out for blood.

Fifty-five minutes, three pitching changes, and just seven outs later, the Rangers led 9–2 in the top of the third. Though the Orioles cut the lead to 11–8 by the end of the night, the game was basically over then, leaving the Rangers in the driver’s seat and Baltimore in need of a mighty comeback in order to extend a Cinderella season. Read the rest of this entry »

Caleb Ferguson is far from the biggest name on a Los Angeles Dodgers team that won 100 games during the regular season. Much for that reason, people who don’t closely follow the perennial NL West powerhouse probably don’t know how effective he’s been. To little fanfare, the 27-year-old southpaw made 68 appearances and went 7-4 with three saves while posting a 3.43 ERA and a 3.34 FIP over 60-and-a-third innings. Moreover, his numbers were even better if you discount the seven times he served as an opener. As a reliever, Ferguson won seven of nine decisions with a 3.02 ERA and a 3.07 FIP. His K-rate out of the pen was a tasty 27.5%.

Home cooking has been to his liking. Pitching at Chavez Ravine — Dodger Stadium if you will — the Columbus, Ohio native logged a sparkling 1.10 ERA while holding opposing hitters to a paltry .190/.258/.267 slash line.

Those things said, Ferguson is a square peg in a round hole when it comes to one of the organization’s well-known strengths. Analytics aren’t his thing.

“I guess it has the characteristics of a high-spin fastball,” Ferguson replied when I asked about the movement profile of his mid-90s four-seamer, a pitch he relied on 66.5% of the time this year. “But I don’t really look at the metrics, to be honest. I just come in and try to make good pitches. More than anything, I try to throw the ball in the safest spot to each guy. When I look at scouting reports, it’s basically just the safe zones and the danger zones.”

Ferguson likewise claimed not to know the metrics on his 33.5 percent-usage slider (Baseball Savant classifies the pitch as a cutter). Nor is he interested in knowing. Read the rest of this entry »

In their Wild Card Series, the Diamondbacks were the comeback kids, the sixth seed that had limped their way into the postseason with a .451 second-half winning percentage and erased deficits of multiple runs on back-to-back days to beat the Brewers in Milwaukee. But on Saturday in Los Angeles, there was no mistaking it: this team can be a serious threat. Arizona came out punching in the first inning, with hard-hit ball after hard-hit ball off Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw, chasing the left-hander after just a third of an inning – the shortest start of his Hall of Fame career. Before the Dodgers knew it, the Diamondbacks led 9-0, a hole too deep for Los Angeles to climb out of:

The second pitch of the game, a 73 mph curveball, was smoked by Ketel Marte at 115.7 mph and ate up James Outman in center field, leaving Marte on second with a double. It was good for the second-hardest batted ball of the over 21,000 hit off Kershaw in the Statcast portion of his career. In all of Statcast history, just two hitters – Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton – have tagged a pitch thrown at 73 mph or slower with an exit velocity that high. It was a harbinger of things to come, the first of eight hard-hit balls in the opening inning, which amounts to one of the most impressive first-inning onslaughts in recent memory – no team has unleashed more hard-hit balls in the first inning of any game in over five years. Arizona plated six runs in the first and three in the second, and the focus – even Dave Roberts’ focus, as he shared in a third-inning interview – shifted to what a blowout here means for the rest of the series. Read the rest of this entry »

The rematch of last year’s NLDS between Philadelphia and Atlanta started off the same way it did last October: with a surprising win by the underdog Phillies. They eked out three runs and held the Braves scoreless at home for the first time this year and the first time since August 28, 2021. It was also the Phillies’ seventh consecutive win in the opening game of a postseason series, putting them in the driver’s seat in the five-game series — again.

The biggest weakness of the Philadelphia roster that reached the World Series last year was their bullpen. But the Phillies quietly led all of baseball in pitching WAR this season thanks to a fantastic rotation and a much improved relief corps, with their ‘pen improving its adjusted ERA from 105 to 81. With Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola spent during the Wild Card round, the Phillies turned to Ranger Suárez to make the start in Game 1; he turned in a solid effort, lasting 3.2 innings and allowing just three baserunners while striking out four. When he ran into some trouble in the fourth inning, manager Rob Thomson used a quick hook on his starter and handed the game over to his bullpen. Six relievers went on to combine for 5.1 scoreless innings in an impressive display from the team’s most improved unit:

Instead of a dominating performance marked by tons of strikeouts, the Phillies were perfectly satisfied to allow Atlanta to aggressively put the ball in play. No team fared better than the Braves when making contact this year — they led baseball in both wOBA and expected wOBA on contact — but thanks to some phenomenal defense and a healthy dose of contact management, they were frustrated all night long. Read the rest of this entry »

This was an unfamiliar place to be for the Twins, after snapping a playoff losing streak dating back to 2004 and winning their first postseason series since 2002. Generations of Twins players have gone by without experiencing a playoff win with the team, but the current squad, coming off a two-game sweep of Toronto, was rewarded with a matchup against last year’s World Series champions. But while they had opportunities to break the game open, especially in the early innings, they were unable to fully capitalize, dropping the series opener, 6–4.

Houston starter Justin Verlander threw six scoreless frames, but through his first couple innings, it was an open question as to how long he would remain in the game. He allowed three baserunners in the first, throwing just 10 of 23 pitches for strikes. After walking Edouard Julien and allowing a hard-hit single to Jorge Polanco, he served a fastball right down the middle to Royce Lewis — a scary pitch given Lewis’ string of excellent performances, especially in the Wild Card series. But he swung over the pitch and tapped it to shortstop for the tailor-made double play. Verlander allowed another walk, but he escaped the inning with a groundout.

His second inning went similarly, as he erased singles by Carlos Correa and Ryan Jeffers with another 6-4-3 twin killing, this time off the bat of Michael A. Taylor. Julien doubled to start the third, the sixth Twins baserunner through 10 batters, but he was tagged out in a baserunning blunder. Verlander would allow just two more men to reach over the next four innings. Read the rest of this entry »

BALTIMORE — The Orioles were one of the toughest teams to put away in the regular season, as their record, status as the AL’s top seed, and distinction of never having been swept all attest. But in Game 1 of the ALDS against a Rangers team that kept going the wrong way in the standings in September, the script was reversed.

In front of a capacity crowd in a game delayed an hour by rain, it was the Rangers who clung to a narrow lead for six innings, as every Baltimore rally fell short. Despite the conditions and an unfavorable pitching matchup, Texas took an upset 3–2 win behind the tandem of Andrew Heaney and Dane Dunning. With that win comes control of the series. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

After nearly two decades of postseason futility, the Minnesota Twins not only won a playoff game, they advanced to the next round for the first time since 2002. Their reward? Facing the Houston Astros, who have held a firm grip on the American League over the last six years, reaching the ALCS in each of those seasons to go along with two championships and another pair of AL pennants to boot. On paper, this seems like a classic David versus Goliath matchup, but there are key distinctions between the clubs that should make this a very entertaining series:

The Twins won a weak AL Central with relative ease thanks to one of the best starting rotations in baseball. That pitching staff is a big reason why they’re not simply the token representative from their division but a real threat to make a deep run into the postseason. They might not have quite the same star power of some of the other contenders in the American League, but there are few holes on their roster and it seems like they’re peaking at the right time. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time since 2016, the Orioles are in the playoffs, and likewise for the Rangers, as both teams’ lengthy — and very different — rebuilding efforts have finally paid off. Under Brandon Hyde, the largely homegrown Orioles won 101 games, their highest total since 1979, and claimed the AL’s top seed, giving them a first-round bye. With future Hall of Fame manager Bruce Bochy coming out of retirement, the Rangers, who have been built much more through trades and a whole lot of money spent in free agency, won 90 games but coughed up a 2.5-game AL West lead. As they finished with the same record as the Astros but lost the season series, 9–4, they wound up seeded fifth as a wild card but ran circles around the 99-win Rays in the first round, outscoring them 11–1 in two games in front of paltry Tropicana Field crowds.

Injuries will color this series, most notably the absences of the Orioles’ Félix Bautista, who dominated hitters for five months before tearing his UCL, and Max Scherzer, who came over via a deadline trade with the Mets and pitched well before straining his teres major. Rotation-mate Jon Gray is also out due to a forearm strain.

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