Beyond Giancarlo Stanton going electric and Gerrit Cole proving that investing $315 million in him was one of Brian Cashman’s better decisions, not a whole lot else has gone right for the Yankees against the Rays. Going into Game 4 needing a win to stay alive, they’d found no answer to the Ruth and Gehrig cosplay of Randy Arozarena and Ji-Man Choi. They’d struggled to do much of anything when faced with Tampa Bay’s best relievers. Most of the lineup aside from Stanton, Aaron Hicks, DJ LeMahieu and (unexpectedly enough) backup catcher turned starter Kyle Higashioka hadn’t shown up. New York had come by its series deficit and a potential trip home fairly.

But the biggest problem for the Yankees in this series is the one that was the biggest problem in the 2019 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2018 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2017 playoffs: a pitching staff that hasn’t performed consistently. Granted, that’s a small sample, with only six starts so far and two of those belonging to Cole. But Masahiro Tanaka, normally the postseason stalwart, has been bludgeoned in his two turns, including Game 3. Aaron Boone’s attempt at a Rays-style opener gambit in Game 2 quickly went pear-shaped. Game 4 rested on Jordan Montgomery, who hadn’t pitched in over two weeks and could at best provide three or four innings in what would be his postseason debut. If he went south early, making it to Game 5 was highly unlikely.

Yet for the first time this month, Boone got a capable start from a non-Cole pitcher, and his bullpen was able to hold it together for a 5–1 win. Even better, Game 5 will be in the hands of Cole, who held the Rays in check in Game 1, bulldozed the Indians in the Wild Card round, and would be a popular pick league-wide for “man you most want on the mound in an elimination game.” Read the rest of this entry »

For a little while there, everything was going the way the A’s drew it up. Thanks to — you guessed it — a homer, they had a 3-0 lead entering the bottom of the fourth. Zack Greinke, though generally effective, had allowed consecutive singles to Matt Olson and Mark Canha in the top of third; he hung a 3-2 slider to Ramón Laureano, and the A’s jumped out ahead. Meanwhile, Frankie Montas had managed to face the minimum through his three frames, outside of Yuli Gurriel reaching base on an Olson error. After the Laureano homer, the A’s win expectancy jumped to 76.4%. It wasn’t just that they had a chance to win, to stay alive and push this ALDS to a winner-take-all fifth game; they had a good chance.

It was all the more astonishing, then, how quickly the wheels fell off for Oakland, how quickly the Astros swung the game in their favor, taking it to a point of no return. Though the A’s offense did their best to rally, the scale of the thumping the Astros lineup put on Montas and a desperate, ineffective succession of A’s relievers was, in the end, too much for them to overcome. With a final score of 11-6, the Astros make their way into their fourth consecutive ALCS, while the A’s make their way home after yet another postseason heartbreak.

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The Atlanta Braves finished sweeping the Miami Marlins on Thursday afternoon, issuing a 7-0 shellacking to knock the Fish out of the postseason. After holding Cincinnati’s bats firmly in check in two Wild Card games, the Braves’ bats exploded in Games 1 and 3, with a generally ineffective Miami lineup struggling to keep up.
Coming into the 2020 season, one of the big question marks surrounding the Marlins was just how effective they’d actually be at scoring runs. In 2019, the team finished last in the National League in runs scored, nearly half a run per game behind the 14th-place San Diego Padres. The Marlins added some veteran depth to the lineup in the form of Jesús Aguilar, Jonathan Villar, Corey Dickerson, and Matt Joyce last offseason — which feels like it was about five years ago at this point — and the hope was that with the team’s impressive stable of young pitching improving, they’d score just enough runs to become relevant. With an assist from a 16-team playoff format, that’s exactly what happened; the offense managed to support a generally solid rotation, and the weak bullpen (5.65 FIP) didn’t sink the team enough to drop it below .500.

That blueprint worked against the Cubs and their 10th-ranked offense and thanks to Sandy Alcantara and Sixto Sánchez, seven runs in two games still left Miami with significant room to spare. But shutting out the Braves is a trickier proposition and when Atlanta’s run-scoring machine ramped up, the Marlins failed to match it, leading them to be the first team eliminated from the round of eight. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees lost to the Rays for the second night in a row on Wednesday night to fall behind in the Division Series, two games to one, but Giancarlo Stanton continued his rampage. The 30-year-old slugger, who was limited to just 23 games this year due to a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, has now homered in all five of the Yankees’ postseason games, with a consecutive games steak that’s one short of the record.

Stanton’s latest blast, his sixth of the postseason, came in the eighth inning off Shane McClanahan, a 23-year-old lefty who in Game 1 became the first pitcher in major league history to debut in the postseason without having pitched in a regular season game. He got out of that one unscathed, but not so on Wednesday:

The homer, Stanton’s second hit of the night, came with a man on base and trimmed the Rays’ lead to 8-4, but the Yankees could draw no closer. To date, they’ve scored 18 runs in the Division Series, 10 of which have been driven in by Stanton with his four homers. He broke open Game 1 with a ninth-inning grand slam off John Curtiss, extending a 5-3 lead to 9-3:

Stanton followed that up with a pair of homers off Tyler Glasnow in Game 2, first with a game-tying opposite field liner in the second inning, and then a three-run blast — and I do mean blast — in the fourth, which cut a 5-1 lead to 5-4, though the Rays eventually pulled away for a 7-5 win:

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There’s a moment in almost every Clayton Kershaw postseason start where the entire enterprise threatens to swing completely off its axis — where the boulder, finally nearing the top of the hill, begins its inexorable roll back down, leaving the three-time Cy Young winner flattened underneath it. It never happened in the Wild Card round, when Kershaw sliced and diced a punchless Brewers lineup over eight scoreless innings, but it arrived in Game 2 of the NLDS against the Padres in the sixth inning, when two pitches and two swings seemed like they would undo all of the veteran lefty’s hard work.

Clayton Kershaw is not Clayton Kershaw™ any more. At the same time, he is neither bad nor finished, and his 2020 was a resurgence previously hard to imagine for a 32-year-old man with 2,300-plus innings on his arm and a wobbly back that shifts and grinds like tectonic plates. He made 10 starts and threw 58.1 innings and struck out 62 batters and posted a 2.16 ERA, a hair off his 2.13 mark in 2016, the last year when he was really, truly the best pitcher in baseball. Since then he’s been more passable imitation of himself than the genuine thing, but this season was proof that he could adjust and thrive despite a fastball that’s past its peak.

The trick to Kershaw’s success, as Ben Lindbergh noted over at The Ringer, is that he starts off with that fastball — which, after dipping to an average of 90.5 mph, a career low, in 2019, rose back up 91.6 this year and got up to 93–94 — and then goes to his slider. It’s a winning strategy for several reasons: Hitters tend to let the first pitch go, allowing Kershaw to pump in strikes and get ahead; and his slider is a monster of a pitch. None of that likely works without that four-seamer getting a little more life on it, but Kershaw also has smarts and savvy and spin on his side, and he can reach back and find his old self albeit without the heat.

So it was against Milwaukee and so it looked against San Diego. For the first five innings, Kershaw stuck to his plan: 19 first-pitch fastballs out of 24 offerings, 45 fastballs total averaging 91.7 mph and peaking at 93.6, lots of two-strike sliders. And for five innings it worked, aside from a Wil Myers RBI double in the second on a slider that caught too much of the plate; otherwise, weak contact and strikeouts abounded. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Yankees had a chance. It was the third inning; the bases were loaded, the game was tied, and Luke Voit — baseball’s home run champ in the regular season — was at the plate. When Tampa Bay Rays starter Charlie Morton fell behind him 3-0, you could practically hear the Yankees’ bench vibrating with anticipation. Then back-to-back pitches were called strikes at the knees, and there was a new kind of tension. Both offerings could have been ruled out of the zone to force home a run, but they weren’t, and now Voit had just one more shot to do damage. Instead, he grounded out harmlessly to the shortstop.

Then the Rays got their chance. Joey Wendle singled to lead off the top of the fourth against Yankees right-hander Masahiro Tanaka, who followed that with a walk issued to Willy Adames. Then Kevin Kiermaier turned on the first pitch he saw and launched it into the empty seats in right field for a three-run homer to put the Rays ahead. Tampa Bay added on with two more big homers in the ensuing innings while simultaneously holding the Yankees to their smallest run total of the postseason in an 8-4 victory in ALDS Game 3 on Wednesday at Petco Park in San Diego. The Rays, the AL’s top seed in the playoffs, are now up 2-1 in the series and just a game away from eliminating their division rivals. Read the rest of this entry »

After their regular season dustup — not to mention Houston’s jawing leading into the ALDS — it seemed as if the Astros and the Athletics might come to postseason blows. Instead, they’ve settled for a barrage of long balls. Wednesday’s Game 3 featured seven more home runs, including five from the eventually triumphant Oakland, tying a postseason franchise record set during the Jose Canseco era. The A’s avoided a sweep and pushed the series to a fourth game while the combined home run count in the series climbed to 18.

For the first time in the postseason, the grind of a five-game series without an off day had a clear impact on which pitchers were deployed and how they performed. With electric rookie reliever Enoli Paredes unavailable after pitching in the first two games, and the other Astros starters unavailable to piggyback due to the Division Series schedule and the smoldering questions surrounding Zack Greinke’s health, the soft underbelly of the Astros bullpen was exposed late in the game as the Athletics scored five combined runs to take the lead.

Most of Oakland’s damage, as well as both the most significant narrative and literal swing in the game, came against reliever Josh James, who entered the game with a two-run lead. After pitching a scoreless, double play-aided sixth inning, James returned for the seventh and surrendered singles to Marcus Semien and Tommy La Stella before Chad Pinder, who had been in a strict left/right platoon with Jake Lamb leading up to the game, was left in to face the same-handed James. He sent a first-pitch breaking ball over the right field wall, tying the game at seven. Read the rest of this entry »

This time there wasn’t much offense. On the heels of a Game 1 that finished 9-5, the Atlanta Braves took a commanding two-games-to-none lead in the NLDS by pushing past the Miami Marlins by a score of 2-0. Ian Anderson and four relievers combined for the shutout, with a pair of solo home runs providing just enough run-support for a suddenly-stellar pitching staff.

What scoring there was came early. Dansby Swanson took Pablo López deep in the second inning with what was his second home run in his last two at-bats. In Game 1, the 26-year-old shortstop — given name James Dansby Swanson — had homered his final time up to cap a six-run Atlanta seventh.

Travis d’Arnaud, who’d preceded Swanson’s Game 1 blast with one of his own, then went yard against López in the fourth. Seven plate appearances into the NLDS, 31-year-old backstop — given name Travis E. d’Arnaud — now had a single, a double, and a pair of walks to go along with his two dingers.

Anderson wasn’t giving up anything. A suddenly-feeble Marlins lineup managed just three hits off him in five-and-two thirds innings — a near copy-cat of his no-runs-on-two-hits, six-inning performance last week in the Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Gibson, who died of pancreatic cancer on Friday, October 2 — the fourth Hall of Famer to die this year, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, and former teammate Lou Brock — was as tough and intense as they came. In 1967, about midway through his 17-year run with the Cardinals (1959-75), he was hit on the right shin by a Roberto Clemente liner. He pitched to three more batters before his already-cracked fibula snapped, sending him to the disabled list for over seven weeks. In the 13 months following his return, he was as dominant as any pitcher since the dead ball era, a run that included a 1.12 ERA during the 1968 regular season, still the lowest of any qualifier since 1914.

The indomitable Gibson possessed a mental toughness as well, one founded in a reserve of self-confidence that was the equal of his 95-mile-an-hour fastball and menacing glare. He dealt in intimidation, asserting his ownership of the inside corner of the plate and taking pride in his ability to “mess with a batter’s head without letting him into mine.” In his 1992 autobiography, Stranger to the Game, he described his repertoire: “I actually used about nine pitches — two different fastballs, two sliders, a curve, a change-up, knockdown, brushback, and hit-batsman.”

“He’d knock down his own grandmother if she dared to challenge him,” Hank Aaron once counseled teammate Dusty Baker. In one oft-told story, Gibson plunked former roommate Bill White after he was traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies:

Bob Gibson on hitting his friend Bill White. pic.twitter.com/6jxLF2MB5e

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 3, 2020

“I wanted to own the outside part of the plate. And the only reason you throw in here is to keep a guy from going out there,” said Gibson. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres knew this was the outcome they risked. Just two pitches into the second inning of his start in Game 1 of the NLDS against the Los Angeles Dodgers, right-handed pitcher Mike Clevinger made a somber exit from the game, wincing at a pain in his elbow. He would later say it felt like bones were hitting the back of his elbow. The Padres knew this might happen, because it was almost exactly what did the last time Clevinger started a game, back on September 23. It was the reason his attempt to clear himself for the team’s Wild Card series last week failed. This was the risk the team took, however, because it was still the Padres’ best chance at avoiding precisely what happened anyway — a revolving door of relievers being asked to keep the team afloat for a fourth time in as many playoff games.

It wasn’t the Padres’ bullpen that stole the show on Tuesday, however, but that of the Dodgers, who picked up another short start by Walker Buehler by silencing San Diego’s deep lineup en route to a 5-1 victory to open the best-of-five series at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. The second game of the series will take place Wednesday at 9:08 p.m.

Buehler went four innings for the Dodgers while allowing just one run on two hits, but walked four and threw 95 pitches. Behind him, Dustin May, Victor González, Blake Treinen and Kenley Jansen combined for five innings of one-hit shutout baseball, striking out six and walking none.

For five innings, the Padres’ bullpen had walked a high-wire act without falling: eight walks, a hit by pitch, and an error in the field behind them, yet somehow just one run allowed. Those numbers suggest shoddy command, to be sure, but they also show the lengths to which the ‘pen was willing to go to avoid giving into the Dodgers’ powerful lineup. Of the 116 pitches thrown by Padres arms over those innings, just 58 were strikes. That led to a mind-numbing 11 hitters reaching three-ball counts; it also led to the Dodgers not recording a hit.

In the sixth inning, the dam finally broke. With the game tied at one apiece, Padres right-hander Garrett Richards walked Chris Taylor with one out before surrendering the first hit of the game — a Mookie Betts double to right-center. Left-hander Matt Strahm was then brought into face Corey Seager, who scored Taylor on a fly ball to give Los Angeles its first lead of the game. Read the rest of this entry »