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“He’s not coming out of this game” was the comment from NBC play-by-play announcer Dave Flemming while the broadcast lingered on a shot of Padres Game 1 starter Michael King as he sat in the dugout looking through a notebook during the bottom of the sixth inning. “He’s not reading War and Peace either,” added color commentator Mark Grant. “He’s studying hitters.”

But that’s not to say King and the Padres wouldn’t find certain aspects of War and Peace relatable. Speaking in reference to his own work, Leo Tolstoy acknowledged that War and Peace defies conventional attempts at classification, saying it is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” Comparatively, analysts have struggled all season to properly define the 2026 Padres. If Tolstoy had scripted the Friars, he might have said they are “not a playoff team, much less a contender, and still less a club in the midst of a rebuild.”

Instead, the Padres were a team that went 30-20 in its first 50 games, 19-31 over the next 50 games, and then finished out the season by going 42-20. On July 22, their odds of making the playoffs bottomed out at 7.4%. Then they went on a run, and just one month later, their odds had surged to 68.9%. But rather than continue that upward trajectory en route to clinching a playoff spot, they first endured a backslide that shrank their odds to 39.2% as recently as September 2. It would have been logical for San Diego to sell at the trade deadline, but Padres POBO A.J. Preller was born without the specific bit of genetic code that allows humans to understand selling as a strategic concept. Instead, they added starting pitchers Robbie Ray and Casey Mize and finished the year as the top-seeded Wild Card team in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice may be Massachusetts natives, but the two Yankee stars did nothing to help the Red Sox during Tuesday night’s Wild Card Series opener against their archrivals. In a start reminiscent of his performance in last year’s do-or-die Game 3 between the two teams, Schlittler, the fireballing 25-year-old righty from Walpole, dominated the Red Sox hitters, throwing 6 1/3 shutout innings and striking out 10 while allowing just two hits. Rice, the 27-year-old slugger from Cohasset, picked up the slack for the injured Aaron Judge by going 4-for-5 with two homers and six runs batted in as the Yankees waited out Red Sox ace Payton Tolle, then broke the game open against the bullpen en route to a 9-0 romp.

This was the sixth time in 363 days that Schlittler faced the Red Sox, dating back to the aforementioned Game 3 of the 2025 Wild Card Series. At that point, the baby-faced rookie — a seventh-round pick in 2022 out of Northeastern University with just 14 major league starts under his belt — turned in eight brilliant shutout innings, striking out 12 without a walk and allowing just five hits, all singles. In his first full season, while leading the league in ERA (1.95) and WAR (6.2) and making an overwhelming case for the AL Cy Young Award, Schlittler started four times against the Red Sox, putting up a 0.74 ERA in 24 1/3 innings while striking out 27. Those numbers conceal a few minor blemishes; he did allow four unearned runs in five innings in a loss on June 25, the only time in those six starts that the Yankees were defeated, and he walked five in 5 2/3 shutout innings on August 28. But so far, the Sox have yet to solve him.

They certainly didn’t on Tuesday night, though they did make Schlittler work hard enough to run up his pitch count early and to throw a career-high 117 pitches. Though Schlittler struck out three in the first inning, he needed 22 pitches to complete the frame thanks to a 10-pitch at-bat by Adley Rutschman that culminated in a soft single to left-center. His next three innings were spotless and included five more stirkeouts, but he needed 44 pitches for those, then another 23 for a fifth inning in which he yielded a two-out, seven-pitch walk to Jarren Duran, and 18 for a 1-2-3 sixth that included two more strikeouts. The pesky Red Sox fouled off 24 of his pitches in all, including 14 with two strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you have to go with a bullpen game. It isn’t exciting, but it’s just the reality of modern baseball. With the White Sox and Astros each battling right to the end of the season for their respective division titles, it set up a Game 1 matchup of poorly-rested pitching staffs without full, conventional rotations. Both managers looked at the starters they had available on full rest (nobody), looked at the starters they’d already used on short rest in the last week (plenty), and each settled on a bullpen game. And that’s how we ended up with a lengthy, disjointed contest where the outcome felt decided in the first hour.

Will Venable and the White Sox pitching staff put their best foot forward to open Game 1. Hagen Smith might get a playoffs-opening start as a full-time starter before his career is over; the fifth overall pick in the 2024 draft, he ripped through the minors and looked amazing in a multi-inning relief role down the stretch. When people talk about playoff pitching as nine innings of closer-level stuff, they’re imagining guys like Smith handling short stints. He came out fully gassed up, throwing a tick and a half faster than he had all season and ripping off electric sliders at the drop of a hat. He max-efforted his way through three innings of work. Perhaps most impressive, he went after Yordan Alvarez both times he faced him, including with a runner in scoring position, and won both confrontations. Read the rest of this entry »

A high-stakes game between two archrivals, featuring two of the best left-handed starters in the league against two extremely top-heavy lineups: It was always going to come down to fine margins. One pitching change, one missed call, one baserunning mistake.

In Game 1 between the Phillies and Braves, those margins were physically perceptible, as the two teams traded jabs for seven and a half innings, before Austin Riley bounced a game-winning three-run homer off the top of the right field wall at Truist Park. The Braves, 5-3 winners in the postseason curtain-raiser, are now on the verge of a date with the Dodgers in the NLDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Credit the Phillies for trying. When I highlighted the worst defenses among contending teams in early July, they were the poster boys, scoring worse than any team besides the decidedly non-contending Rockies in the multi-metric methodology I’ve used for the past four seasons. But when the August 3 trade deadline arrived, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski took a step to improve that shoddy defense, acquiring second baseman Luis Arraez from the Giants and setting off a game of musical chairs that sent incumbent second baseman Bryson Stott to third base, third baseman Alec Bohm to first, and first baseman Bryce Harper to right field. The defense at those spots mostly improved, but last Thursday, with the Phillies in the midst of what would become a 2-6 skid that nearly cost them a Wild Card berth, Arraez sprained his left ankle while trying to avoid a tag at first base. On Monday, interim manager Don Mattingly announced that the 29-year-old infielder will be left off the roster for the team’s Wild Card Series against the Braves.

How Mattingly will proceed with his lineup is unclear. In the three games Arraez missed — including Sunday’s playoff berth-clinching win over the Rays — Edmundo Sosa started at third base twice while Stott returned to second, while in the other game, Bohm and Harper moved back to their original positions as well; they lost that one 12-1.

Below I’ll take a closer look at the metrics underlying the Phillies’ defensive configurations, but long story short, they rate as the playoff team with the worst defense, as they did last year and in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »

To little fanfare, Nick Sogard was a key contributor to a Red Sox regular season that began abysmally — “Sell the team” chants were heard nearly as often at Fenway Park as “Sweet Caroline” in the early months — and culminated in a Wild Card berth. Filling in wherever needed in a lineup that dealt with both injuries and uneven performances, the 29-year-old jack of all trades ended up starting 24 games at second base, 16 at first base, seven at third base, and four at shortstop. Moreover, he was solid defensively at each of those spots. He was charged with just four errors, none of them over his 302 innings at the keystone position.

The switch-hitter also provided value with the bat. Over 277 trips to the plate, he slashed a pesky .255/.342/.385 with five home runs and a 105 wRC+. Fitting well into the style of play that emerged after Chad Tracy replaced Alex Cora as Boston’s manager in late April, Sogard is not only fundamentally sound, he is also proficient at making contact and playing small ball. (These aren’t your stereotypical Red Sox; their 36 sacrifice hits were third most in the junior circuit, as well as five more than Cora’s club had in the previous three seasons combined.)

That said, Sogard is by no means a banjo hitter. While no one would ever mistake him for a basher, he can nonetheless impact a baseball, which is one of the reasons he is where he is. Not so long ago, he profiled as a fringe big leaguer at best — a Quad-A type whose value came primarily from his versatility — due to a lack of pop.

“Offensively, my foundation is still very similar to what it has always been,” Sogard told me recently. “I try to swing at strikes and put balls in play. I think those are my strengths. But this organization has put a pretty big focus on me hitting the ball harder and getting some power to my game. There was literally none of it when I got drafted.” Read the rest of this entry »

No one will be happier than the Houston Astros when the second game of their Wild Card Series starts. See, during the first game, they won’t have a playoff win-loss record, so the fact that they went 81-81 this year, the worst record ever to win a division title, will come up early and often. That’s such a striking fact that we’ll no doubt continue to hear about it throughout the playoffs, but in their first game, it’s going to be one of the main topics of conversation. Houston would love nothing more than to leave behind that pedestrian regular season and get back to what the team normally does in October: maraud through the American League towards the World Series.

The Chicago White Sox, on the other hand, would probably be happy to live in the 2026 regular season forever. Written off before the year even began, they started hot and kept winning. While pundits expected them to continue their slow rebuild, their youth movement bubbled over into major league success far faster than expected. They led the AL Central longer than any other team this season. They won 24 more games than they did last year, which was itself a 19-game improvement on the year before. Unless they win the World Series, the 2026 White Sox will be remembered for their miraculous regular season, not whatever goes on in the few games they play afterwards. But being remembered is for the future; right now, all that matters is avoiding going home for one more series. So while Chicago has blown away expectations and Houston has fallen short of meeting their own, none of that matters for the next two or three games.

The divergent regular season experiences of these two clubs make for an interesting setup for this clash. But that’s just the big picture storyline. The series has several points of interest on both sides that I’m excited to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want a good example of how quickly fortunes change in baseball, just look at the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves. This year, the Phillies just barely avoided an embarrassing collapse that almost knocked them out of the playoffs completely, while the Braves had a hot April and never saw their season in any kind of real jeopardy. Just two years ago, you could perfectly flip-flop the two teams, with the Braves barely hanging on before getting quickly knocked out by the San Diego Padres in the Wild Card round, while the Phillies coasted to a fairly drama-free NL East crown. Now the two divisional rivals get three games to try and ruin the other team’s season.

While the Braves have to be a bit disappointed that they missed out on a first-round bye thanks to the Brewers apparently solving baseball and the Dodgers winning 100 games, it still has to feel quite a bit better than last year, when they finished in fourth place in their division with a 76-86 record. Atlanta has some real high points, but the team also isn’t the juggernaut that won 101 games in 2022 and 104 games in 2023. Except for the general lack of a competent starter in left field, those Braves were stacked from top to bottom, and getting through the season was simply a matter of pointing the team in the right direction and watching it cook. Read the rest of this entry »

While there was only one Instructional League game in the Valley on Monday, Tuesday had three options: Los Naranjeros de Hermosillo (a Mexican Pacific League team from Sonora, the Mexican State immediately south of Arizona) was at the Athletics’ facility in Mesa, while the Royals (hosting the Reds) and the Rangers (hosting the Padres) would have simultaneous games at their shared complex in Surprise. I carpooled with Baseball America contributor and photographer, Bill Mitchell, to the northwest end of the metro for those games, with two cameras in tow.

Within minutes of getting to Surprise, I learned that Joe Musgrove and Lucas Giolito were making rehab appearances for the Padres, and that the Royals-Reds game was slated for 11 innings. About 10 minutes before first pitch, I set up a camera at the Royals’ field and began to make my way over to the Rangers’ side to watch Giolito and Musgrove in real time. While anxiously daydreaming about arriving just a tad late to the other field, I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings and was nearly hit by an errant Steven Zobac long-toss throw, which whizzed past my shins. Halfway across the parking lot, I was relieved when I heard music coming from the Rangers’ field — they were still getting loose. I made it in time. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the nor’easter dumping rain up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the Cubs have traveled from Chicago to Boston to St. Petersburg and finally all the way across the country to San Diego in the past five days, but they don’t sound daunted by the challenge. “Just tell us where to play,” manager Craig Counsell told reporters on Friday. “We’ll show up and play.” Well, on Tuesday, the Padres and Cubs face off in the Wild Card Series between the National League’s top two non-division winners. Both teams have plenty of offense, a great defense, and some question marks on the mound. You’re playing in San Diego, Craig. Get yourself one of those burritos with French fries in it and get to the ballpark.

The other Craig – that would be Padres manager Craig Stammen – is in his first season skippering a major league club. Or any club, for that matter. You could view his inexperience as a liability, or you could view his long, recent playing career as a reliever as a tactical advantage for pulling the right bullpen strings in a short series. Either way, you should also probably get yourself a California-style burrito before the game, Other Craig. They’re so good.

The Padres look to be peaking at the right time. They went out and grabbed the first Wild Card spot, ending the season on a 17-3 run, with just enough of a cushion to line up their three best starters for the Wild Card series. But they’re a lot more than a team on a hot streak. At 41-18, they’ve had the best record in baseball since July 24. How long do you need to be playing like the best team in baseball before you simply are the best team in baseball? The Padres have some major concerns when it comes to pitching, but they’ve also got a couple of the little things that can make an outsized difference in a short series. Their rotation is front-loaded. They’ve got an all-world closer. They’re one of the better baserunning and base stealing teams in the game. Read the rest of this entry »