On ESPN2’s Phillies-Cardinals broadcast, Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez — like everyone has at some point this postseason — explained why baseball has become a Three True Outcome-driven sport. You know the gist: Pitchers have become so good it’s hard to string together sequential offense. Better to wait for a mistake and swing like hell when it comes.

For the first time since 2010, the Philadelphia Phillies have won a playoff series, and Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina have taken part in a meaningful professional game for the last time. These things are so because of mistakes: Who made them, which ones went unpunished, and which ones decided a tense 2-0 game. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after playing the fastest postseason game since 1999, the Rays and Guardians combined for a game more than twice as long, lasting 15 innings and four hours and 57 minutes. Dominant pitching was the name of the game as both teams were held scoreless until the 15th inning — the longest scoreless postseason game in major league history. The decisive blow came when Oscar Gonzalez blasted a Corey Kluber cutter deep into left-center field for the walk-off win.

Between the two teams, 16 different pitchers combined for 39 strikeouts, eight walks, and 11 hits. They threw 432 pitches, 68% of which were strikes. Just 15 of the 58 balls in play were hard hit. No matter how you slice it, it was simply a masterclass in modern pitching by both teams:

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If there were an ideal blueprint for the Mariners’ first playoff game since 2001, it would have included dominant pitching, good defense, and just enough offense to come away with a win. They executed that plan to perfection on Friday afternoon, defeating the Blue Jays, 4–0, in the first game of their Wild Card Series matchup. Luis Castillo was in complete control over his 7.1 innings pitched, folk hero Cal Raleigh hit a two-run home run in the first inning, and Andrés Muñoz slammed the door in the ninth.

The formidable Blue Jays offense never threatened to break through against Seattle’s flame-throwing duo, who scattered seven hits throughout the game; Toronto’s only extra-base hit came with two outs in the ninth inning. A pair of two-out base hits put runners on first and second in the third and again in the fifth, but Castillo escaped those jams with ease.

It was a bit of an atypical start for the right-hander, who struck out just five Blue Jays, three of them coming in the seventh inning. Toronto’s batters had the fifth-lowest strikeout rate and the seventh-lowest chase rate in the majors this year; they’re a difficult bunch to whiff. Instead of mowing down the opposition with swings and misses, Castillo pitched to the edges of the strike zone, content to let opposing batters reach for pitches. The result: tons of weak contact. He allowed 22 balls to be put in play with an average exit velocity of just 82.6 mph and only six registering as hard hit.

All that weak contact allowed Castillo to be efficient with his pitch count: He never threw more than 20 pitches in a single frame and cruised into the eighth inning. He ended up throwing 108 pitches in the game, 30% of which were called or swinging strikes. Plunking George Springer in a 1–2 count with one out in the eighth proved to be Castillo’s end, but Muñoz entered and retired Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. en route to a five-out save. His only blemish was a two-out double by Matt Chapman in the ninth. Read the rest of this entry »

You bring in star pitchers for games like this. Cost? That’s for the accountants. You can’t put a price on a lockdown playoff start, the kind that sucks the air out of the opposing offense one out at a time. Bring in an ace, find your way to the playoffs, and the dominance will flow.

Oh, this is awkward. Did you think I was talking about Max Scherzer? I meant Yu Darvish, who the Padres acquired before the 2021 season in a blockbuster trade. Darvish didn’t harness his usual swing-and-miss stuff Friday night, but he’s spent the entire 2022 season learning how to succeed without it. He’s never run a lower strikeout rate or missed fewer bats, but it hasn’t mattered: He’s having his best season in eight years thanks to a raft of soft contact and no walks to speak of.

Darvish has been a cutter-first pitcher for years, and he leaned into it to the tune of 39 cutters in 101 pitches against the Mets. It’s still Yu Darvish we’re talking about, so he threw six different pitch types, but cutters and four-seamers comprised 65% of his offerings. Add in his slider, and the count climbs to 90%. We think of Darvish as overpowering opposing hitters, but he’s become adept at keeping them off balance, with equally offense-suppressing results. The Mets were eternally in a 1-2 count, eternally popping up pitches they were just too early or too late on. Read the rest of this entry »

Playoff baseball is a game of rapid reversals and slow-motion disasters. When heartbreak comes, it will either slap you in the face or gradually immure you in slime.

We saw both at Busch Stadium on Friday afternoon, as the Cardinals struck a lightning blow against the Phillies, then — just two outs from a commanding series lead — turned around to find out that the world was ending at a walking pace. A 2-0 ninth-inning lead turned into a 6-3 loss over the course of one bizarre half-inning. The Phillies are now, improbably, merely one win from advancing to the NLDS. Behold the fallout, a win probability chart that looks like a slide whistle sounds:

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The Wild Card Series opener between the Rays and Guardians was quick-moving from the beginning. Rays ace Shane McClanahan worked around a few weakly hit singles in the early innings. Cleveland starter Shane Bieber’s only baserunner in the first four frames — Ji-Man Choi, who walked — was quickly erased by a Manuel Margot double play. The first five full innings were completed in just an hour and nine minutes despite playoff-length commercial breaks, largely due to the lack of offense and Bieber’s ridiculously quick pace on the mound. The matchup of two premier starters — the AL’s fifth- and seventh-best qualified pitchers by ERA — seemed to be everything fans were hoping for.

Bieber’s start was masterful, matching his MO from the regular season: steal strikes with four-seam fastballs, then get hitters to chase his cutter and slider off the plate. The Rays’ righty-heavy lineup couldn’t figure it out for the entire game, coming up empty on 17 of their 27 swings against those two pitches. Unsurprisingly, every single one of those swinging strikes was located down and to his glove side. Bieber’s impeccable placement of pitches on the outer half was especially noteworthy against the chase-happy Christian Bethancourt and Randy Arozarena, who went a combined 0–6 with five strikeouts, four of which came on breaking balls off the plate. Bieber’s 7.2 innings of one-run ball made for the longest playoff start by a Cleveland pitcher in 15 years and will likely be among the longest starts of any pitcher this postseason. That’s a continuation of the impressive volume he put up in the regular season; he was one of just three AL pitchers to cross the 200-inning threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

There isn’t a lot to ponder for most teams when it comes to Wild Card starters. The Padres should start their best three starters. So should the Phillies, Guardians, Blue Jays, Mariners, and Padres. That leaves the Rays, Mets, and Cardinals as teams that have decisions to make, at least in my estimation. The Rays — well, let’s just say that if the Rays called up a sentient ham sandwich to start in the playoffs, we analysts would dig into Ham Sandwichson’s minor league numbers and try to figure out what they saw. There’s no predicting Tampa Bay. That just leaves the Mets and Cardinals.

New York Mets

Wait, the Mets? They have Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, backed by Chris Bassitt and Carlos Carrasco. They’ve already announced Scherzer for the first game; can’t they just run out deGrom and then Bassitt (or Carrasco) in case of a deciding game? Sure, they could. But they should — and probably will — get fancy by holding deGrom back, something I expect them to do should they win the first game of the series.

This doesn’t sound like a good plan offhand. Leave the best starter on the planet behind Bassitt, a man whose fastball can best be described as “adequate,” in a game where you could end the series with a win? That sounds too cute by half for a franchise eternally stepping on rakes. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hedges is Cleveland’s primary catcher because of his defensive value. That’s no secret: The 32-year-old backstop has long been a well below-average hitter — his career wRC+ is a woeful 54 — but when it comes to working with a pitching staff, few do it better. Under his and backup Luke Maile’s guidance, the Guardians rank third in the American League in pitcher WAR and fourth in ERA. It’s fair to say that pitching is the postseason-bound club’s greatest strength.

Hedges fielded questions about his time behind the plate in Cleveland prior to a recent game.

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David Laurila: Who has been the easiest guy on the team to catch, the pitcher for whom you’re kind of just sitting back there on a rocking chair?

Austin Hedges: “Our whole team does a really nice job of staying consistent with all of their pitches, which has made my job really easy. One of the guys in the bullpen that is surprisingly easy to work with — a pitcher with really good stuff — is Enyel De Los Santos. He doesn’t get the credit that a lot of the big dogs in our bullpen do, but he’s been a workhorse for us. He’s gotten big outs in leverage situations. He’s so consistent with all of his pitches that I always know what I’m going to get.” Read the rest of this entry »

Of the 12 teams in the playoffs in 2022, only one was projected by both ZiPS and FanGraphs in the preseason as a sub-.500 team: the Cleveland Guardians. But this lone Cinderella in a sea of mean stepsisters toppled the White Sox handily this year, pulling away from the pack late to finish with an 11-game cushion in the AL Central. As the league’s No. 3 seed by virtue of winning the division, Cleveland now hosts the Tampa Bay Rays in the three-game Wild Card Series.

Broadly speaking, there are broad similarities between the Guardians and the Rays. Both play in smaller markets and, depending on how you look at the issue, have a payroll attitude somewhere on the spectrum from admirably thrifty to Ebenezer Scrooge on tax deadline day. However they got there, these teams embraced modern analytics early on, long before it was de rigeur in baseball, and have seen advantages. The Rays were the league doormat during the early, very non-sabermetric days of the franchise, but after an abrupt change in direction, they have the fourth-most wins in baseball over the last 15 years. The Guardians are not far behind.

Despite both teams regularly making the playoffs, they’ve only met in the postseason once before, in the 2013 AL Wild Card Game. Things didn’t go Cleveland’s way then, as Alex Cobb and Tampa’s bullpen combined for a shutout, causing a quick exit from October. Now Cleveland has a three-game series to get its revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for the National League batting title that ended up coming down to the final day, Jeff McNeil emerged victorious, hitting .465 (20-for-43) in his last 11 games of the season (he was a late defensive replacement Wednesday, but didn’t hit) to finish at .326, one point higher than Freddie Freeman for the highest in the majors. McNeil’s final two weeks put a bow on a career year. He finished with 5.9 WAR, 16th among major league hitters and the most by any Mets primary second baseman save Edgardo Alfonzo, who set the mark with 5.9 WAR in 1999 and then bested it with 6.4 in 2000 (of course, McNeil also spent a good chunk of time in the outfield). He started the All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium, some 100 miles from his southern California home, and now his Mets are headed to his first career postseason. It’s a good year to be Jeff McNeil.

McNeil has generated his value with a set of skills very different from those of your typical modern All-Star or 5.9-WAR player. In a home run era, he’s been as far from a power hitter as an All-Star gets. He finished 2022 with nine home runs, including two in his final three games, making him just the third player in the last decade to amass as many as 5.5 WAR without clearing the fence 10 times. He hit 23 home runs in 2019, the homer-happiest season in major league history, but even with that outlier included, he’s still gone deep in just 2.3% of his big league plate appearances.

In truth, your 2022 batting champion is among the softest-hitting big leaguers in the game, ranking in the 12th percentile in average exit velocity, the eighth percentile in hard-hit percentage, and the seventh percentile in barrel percentage. Just 13 of his 477 batted balls this season registered as barrels: Read the rest of this entry »