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Ben Clemens’ managerial report cards have become a postseason staple here at FanGraphs. We’re continuing the tradition this year, while expanding the pool of writers who’ll contribute, and I’ll be stepping in with grades for the abbreviated Wild Card Series. Since I’m only going over two or three games per manager, these will be briefer than the report cards for the managers who are eliminated from the playoffs in later rounds. We’ll start with the two eliminated National League managers today, and then get into Joe Espada’s and Chad Tracy’s decisions in a couple of days.

Like Ben, I care about process and not results here. It’s easy to say “that was a great move because it worked” or “that was a bad move because it failed,” but managers obviously can’t know the result of their decision as they’re making it. I’ve tried my best to transport myself back to the moment of each decision — taking into account the pitches, innings, and plate appearances that led up to it — while ignoring the outcomes.

Before we get into it, I’ll caution that while these are ostensibly manager report cards, there’s a much larger group of people behind the manager that helps to inform his decisions. Before the game, that includes discussions with the front office, which provides the reams of data that every manager has at his disposal during play; in-game, he’s getting feedback from his coaching staff and players on their levels of health and readiness. It really does take a village to get through a baseball game, and realistically, the praise and scorn doesn’t belong to the manager alone.

And now, away we go.

Craig Counsell

Batting: Incomplete

I was going to give Craig Counsell an A here because the moves he did make were perfectly fine, but that’s giving him far too much credit for three pinch-hitting decisions. The Cubs didn’t hit well this series, through no fault of Counsell’s own, and they have a pretty plug-and-play lineup that became even more rigid after Alex Bregman’s facial fractures limited him to DHing during the team’s anemic offensive showing.

The lineup mirrored the one that had made the Cubs successful basically all season, and the three pinch-hit opportunities Counsell did pull the trigger on were obvious platoon-advantage layups. In Game 1, he hit Michael Conforto (113 wRC+ against righties this season) for catcher Carson Kelly (84) down by eight runs; at that point, leaving Kelly in wouldn’t really have mattered anyway. In Game 2, Tyrone Taylor and his 153 wRC+ against southpaws hit for Michael Busch (who had a still-solid 117 wRC+ against lefties this year) against extremely tough lefty Adrian Morejon; Conforto was used again to hit for Matt Shaw against ninth-inning demigod Mason Miller. Shaw had just 90 plate appearances against righties this year and was 21% below league average by wRC+.

Pitching: C

Normally, I really enjoy watching Counsell manage a pitching staff in the postseason. He’s aggressive. Roles and innings go out the window, and the idea that a starter has to go at least a time or two through the order is nowhere to be found. But I really didn’t see that level of urgency in this series. In Game 1, Matthew Boyd was shaky from literally the first pitch, a changeup that Fernando Tatis Jr. deposited over the center field wall. It didn’t get any better after that; he gave up another homer on another changeup to Manny Machado two batters later. I wouldn’t have necessarily gotten the bullpen up at that point, but I certainly would not have given Boyd the rope to go through the order almost a full second time before pulling him after 17 batters.

Game 2 was a similar story, with Kevin Gausman laboring through the second inning after a strong first. He clearly lacked the higher-end velocity that I thought might show up with the adrenaline of the playoffs but (unfortunately for the Cubs) never did. That created a tighter velocity band between his fastball and splitter, and his whiff rate was a rather mediocre 23%. And yet, he too was permitted to face the top of the order for a second time.

Perhaps Counsell’s reticence to call for a reliever was due to the bullpen’s personnel. The Cubs pitching staff was injury-ravaged the entire season and came into the playoffs without a closer; trade deadline acquisition Ryan Zeferjahn didn’t stabilize the bullpen as hoped, taking a step back after his acquisition from the Angels. But the Cubs had length options in spades, namely David Peterson, Aaron Civale, Shota Imanaga, and Clay Holmes. Imanaga or Holmes may well have been earmarked to start a potential Game 3, but the other options were underutilized. Pairing the righty Civale with the lefty Boyd, or the lefty Peterson with the righty Gausman, and more aggressively managing the starters would have created more inflection points for opposing manager Craig Stammen to have to sort through as he thought about deploying his bench.

Instead, the shaky starters were pushed too far, leading to Game 1 being all but decided by the time Javier Assad was first out of the bullpen, while Daniel Palencia was forced into a dirty inning in Game 2.

Don Mattingly

Batting: B+

The Phillies lineup limped down the stretch, almost blowing the team’s playoff spot in the process. To add injury to insult, Luis Arraez’s badly sprained ankle kept him off the Wild Card roster entirely. That left Don Mattingly with a restricted bench and a handcuffed set of in-game options, not to mention a somewhat makeshift starting lineup. Shielding Brandon Marsh and Justin Crawford from lefties almost entirely in favor of Derek Hill and Bryan De La Cruz made sense, and considering the tools he had at his disposal, I have no qualms with how Mattingly handled his in-game platooning.

Ultimately, I bumped Mattingly down just a hair here for sticking with Trea Turner in the leadoff spot, as he did for the last few games of the regular season while the Phillies were spiraling. I know that a single lineup spot in a handful of games doesn’t actually matter that much, but having a struggling batter guaranteed to get as many or more plate appearances as anyone else on the team still doesn’t sit quite right with me. Additionally, having Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper hit back-to-back (with Bryson Stott just two spots later) created an obvious pocket for Walt Weiss to deploy southpaw Dylan Lee, and even Chris Sale, out of the bullpen. For as bad as Turner’s struggles had been, having a righty amidst the two big lefties may have given Weiss just a little bit more pause when making pitching changes.

Pitching: D+

Like Counsell, Mattingly didn’t have a whole lot to work with here. Jesús Luzardo, Cristopher Sánchez, and Zack Wheeler are awesome. Beyond that, well… it seemed like Jhoan Duran was the only reliever Mattingly thought he could truly trust, and he used him like it in Game 1.

Duran came in to start the seventh inning with the Phillies ahead by a run and Atlanta’s 9-1-2 hitters due up. If things went perfectly, Drake Baldwin and Ronald Acuña Jr.’s last plate appearances — in a Phillies win — would come against Duran in that inning, with Matt Olson looming. With that in mind, I fully endorse using Duran in that spot — and sending him back out for the eighth — with the information Mattingly had at the time. Your best reliever has to face the meat of the lineup and not whoever is due to hit with three outs left in the game. Starting Duran with the nine spot and a clean inning rather than going batter-to-batter with Alex McFarlane or another reliever was perfectly sensical considering Duran’s regular season usage, which almost invariably started with nobody on base.

We have no way of knowing if Duran would have gone three innings and taken it to the house had Austin Riley not taken him deep in the eighth, but there weren’t obvious warning signs showing that he shouldn’t have been allowed to face Riley. Riley was coming off a horrible regular season, and his three-run homer was set up by a well-placed but poorly-hit groundball by Michael Harris II and a yanked knuckle-curve Ozzie Albies hit-by-pitch, this after having secured two outs on three pitches. One poorly-placed fastball doesn’t make leaving Duran in a bad decision; it’s not as if he had thrown 40 pitches and was clearly tiring.

The crushing Game 1 loss left the Phillies with their backs against the wall and Duran unavailable after 27 pitches and nine batters, and considering Donnie Baseball’s hands were tied even more, I thought he mostly did a passable job with his choices in Game 2. If I had been in Mattingly’s shoes, I would have pulled Sánchez immediately after a Baldwin RBI double gave the Braves the lead in the seventh rather than intentionally walking Albies to set up a platoon-advantaged matchup of a gassed Sánchez facing Matt Olson. As the manager there, I’d much prefer a fresher McFarlane against the worse bat of Albies than Sánchez against Olson for a fourth time; that non-move was overly deferential to left-on-left and living and dying with your ace rather than recognizing how little Sánchez had left.

Mattingly and pitching coach Caleb Cotham redeemed themselves to some extent by recognizing that with Duran unavailable, Andrew Painter was the best option out of the bullpen for the eighth and beyond. Sending Painter back out there for the 10th and ultimately letting him face Riley and Harris a second time later in the inning was not without risk, but Painter’s velocity and stuff held, and again, who else did the Phillies really have at that point?

If the series had ended after two games, I’d give Mattingly a solid B or B+ for his moves. But Game 3 was so baffling in its entirety that I tanked his grade a full two letters. The decision to start Aaron Nola over Wheeler frankly defied logic in its reasoning. Nola purportedly got the nod because he was the more rested of the two, with the NBC broadcast also noting that the Phillies thought Wheeler profiled better in relief. But the sequencing of pitcher usage should prioritize the best pitcher, not the guy who’s the most-rested or has the best relief profile. Plus, Wheeler ultimately proved he could be stretched to four innings and 68 pitches — he didn’t exactly turn in a traditional relief outing. (I know, I said I would operate based on the information known to the managers at the time and not what ended up happening, but Wheeler’s eventual workload shows that he had a good amount in the tank, which the Phillies would have been aware of before the game.)

Regardless of how much he had to give, Wheeler having anything at all meant he should have started the game; it guaranteed that his outing would start with the Phillies tied or ahead, not when the club was already playing catch-up. To be clear, Nola was almost surely going to have to pitch at some point in the game — the Phillies put themselves in this mess by taking so long to clinch that Wheeler had to pitch the last game of the season, and he was on short rest in Game 3 — but using him as the opening salvo was the wrong move.

Mattingly was sufficiently aggressive in pulling Nola for Tim Mayza after nine batters faced, though while I’m picking nits, I’ll say I would have brought Mayza (or José Alvarado) in for Dominic Smith in the nine spot rather than have Nola face him. Weiss had been aggressive with pinch-hitting with his down-lineup hitters to that point in the series, and it would’ve been worth finding out if he’d go to his bench early and take one of his weapons for later in the game off the board. Even if Weiss had countered, I’d rather have had a lefty reliever against a righty than Nola against a lefty, as shaky as he had looked to that point.

From there, I can’t quibble with much. Wheeler gave what he could and Duran’s availability was evidently limited to a single inning, with Jonathan Bowlan filling the space between the two arms. Bowlan was a fine choice down by three runs, with McFarlane having pitched the prior two games and presumably available but potentially considerably less sharp. Luzardo was reportedly available for an inning or two despite starting Game 1 and throwing 77 pitches coming back from shoulder inflammation, but I’m okay with not using him as a Hail Mary at that point in the game. Perhaps Wheeler or Duran could’ve instead been stretched to cover the gap that Bowlan filled, but at that point the Phillies were chasing runs, and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to Mattingly and Cotham for knowing their pitchers’ limits better than I do. The decision to start Nola ultimately had the team playing from behind and using its best arms while trailing, not exactly an unforeseeable outcome.

On April 12, 1862, a group of 24 Union spies — most of them volunteer soldiers, led by civilian James Andrews — commandeered a locomotive in Big Shanty, Georgia, and headed north. Their goal was to rendezvous with Union forces in Chattanooga, destroying rail and telegraph lines as they went. Andrews and his men ran out of fuel less than 18 miles from their destination; all of the raiders were captured and eight, including Andrews, were executed.

Some 164 years later and 15 miles southeast, another group of 20-odd belligerents from up north attempted a heist of their own. The Phillies had just stolen Game 2 of the Wild Card Series against the Braves, and a repeat performance would win them the series.

They fared little better than the Andrews Raiders. Michael Harris II put Atlanta ahead with a three-run first-inning home run, and Ray Kerr turned in an improbably spectacular spot start that kept the Braves on top the rest of the way for an eventual 6-2 win. None of Don Mattingly’s men were hanged, at least not yet. We’ll see what kind of a reception they get back home. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 6 and then again on September 12, Tyler Mahle squared off with the Phillies. Both times, he left them frustrated and flailing; he allowed three runs across 13 innings in two Atlanta victories. In each of those games, Mahle leaned on his splitter quite a bit, something he’s done more frequently since joining the Braves at the trade deadline. That set up an interesting mind game in Wednesday’s Game 2. Seeing the same opponent for the third time in a month, would Mahle change his ways? Would the Phillies change their own approach? And could they overcome the Braves, who had been their nemeses throughout the year, and prolong their season for another day with their Kryptonite on the mound?

Mahle’s splitter was devastating last outing, so clearly the Phillies would have to sit on it. But wait! Mahle knows that the Phillies know that they won’t beat his splitter unless they key on it. So clearly, he should throw them fewer splitters. But wait! The Phillies know that Mahle knows that they will probably be sitting on the splitter. So clearly, they can’t look for splitters. But wait! Mahle knows that the Phillies know that… Well, you get the idea. There are levels to this, to paraphrase Kendrick Lamar.

Or maybe not. The Phillies either went too many levels up, or they didn’t even get into the endless iocaine powder reasoning loop I just described. Because Mahle came out leaning on his splitter, just as you’d expect, and the Phillies came out with absolutely no solutions. As Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And to Philadelphia, Mahle’s splitter might as well have been Power Word: Whiff. They surely knew it was coming – it just didn’t matter. 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 »

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 »

We’ve made it to the final weekend of the regular season, and while all but two of the 12 playoff teams have been determined, two divisions titles and one Wild Card berth are still up for grabs. Both the Guardians and White Sox have already clinched a spot in the American League bracket, but only one game separates them in the standings. Cleveland, the first-place team, needs to win the division outright because Chicago owns the tiebreaker. The stakes are high; the victor earns the second seed in the league, a first-round bye, and home-field advantage in the Division Series, while the loser has to play the entire best-of-three Wild Card Series on the road.

The club that finishes second will face either the Astros or the Rangers, who both lost Friday night and fell to 79-81. There’s a very real chance that AL West winner will become the first playoff team ever to finish a full-length season with a losing record. Houston holds the tiebreaker. This race is emblematic of two things wrong with the current rules: 1) We should not allow losing teams to make the postseason, and 2) ties should be settled by one-game playoffs, not math. As if to provide further support for my second point, over in the National League, the surging Diamondbacks are making a last-gasp bid to overcome the reeling Phillies for the final Wild Card spot. Riding a six-game winning streak into Saturday, Arizona is just one game behind the Phillies, but crucially, the Snakes would get in if they finish with the same record. The two teams split their six regular-season matchups — head-to-head record is the first tiebreaker — but the Diamondbacks have the better intra-divisional record, which is the second tiebreaker. Goofy! It’s still going to be a fun baseball weekend, and the playoffs are sure to be a thrill, but think of how much more excitement there would be if we had not one, not two, but three Game 163s on Monday. What could have been.

Before we get to this week’s mailbag, I have one quick programming note. We’ll still be doing our weekly mailbag during the postseason, but we might move around the specific day it runs depending on the playoff schedule. As we did last year, our plan is to do a mailbag before every postseason round, beginning with the Division Series. Also, in case you missed David Appelman’s announcement from Thursday, this year you will need a FanGraphs Membership to read our postseason coverage. You can find all the details in David’s post, but considering our mailbags are also exclusive to FanGraphs Members, most of you reading this probably won’t notice the change. However, what you will notice and appreciate is the other major part of David’s announcement: This October, we’re committed to having staff at every World Series game, allowing for additional reported work and greater access to players and team personnel, with more in-person coverage throughout the earlier rounds as well. In recent years, we’ve had in-person World Series coverage only when the games were played in a city where one of our writers lived. Now, we’ll be there no matter what. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to both keep reading this mailbag and get access to our postseason coverage, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley, and Freddie Freeman were vital contributors to the Braves when they won the 2021 World Series after getting as far as Game 7 of the National League Championship Series against the Dodgers the year before. Half a decade later, all three remain lineup staples — the first two in Atlanta, the third in Los Angeles — but as the postseason approaches, they rate as significant concerns for their respective teams. Though neither Albies nor Riley has turned 30 yet, both have not only had disappointing seasons, they appear to be multiple years into their decline phases, held in place by a combination of loyalty, track record, and long-term extensions. Freeman is 36 years old and a future Hall of Famer nearing the end of his 10th All-Star season, but while he would seem to be on firmer footing, he’s been dealing with a power outage that has coincided with a bout of patellar tendinitis in his right knee. He’s played through it at a time when the Dodgers have dealt with bigger injury concerns, though at least he’s got a first-round bye to help him recover for a few days.

Earlier this week, I went around the diamond to identify the most notable vulnerabilities in the lineups of teams still contending for playoff spots in the American League — a companion of sorts to my annual pre-deadline Replacement Level Killers series, albeit among a more limited field. For the National League, that means the Brewers, Dodgers, Braves, Cubs, and Padres, all of whom have clinched spots (the last two of those on Thursday), plus the Phillies and Diamondbacks. Arizona trails Philadelphia by two games with three to play and has Playoff Odds of just 11.1% before accounting for the complicated and unresolved tiebreaker scenario involving those two teams.

While full-season performances play a significant part in these selections, I’m more concerned with who’s worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Each position has a headliner (or two, if it’s a job share), but at several positions, I’ve noted other teams with concerns, particularly injury-related ones. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the last 2026 edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The regular season is headed to a conclusion, with two division titles and four playoff spots still up for grabs. For me, late September is a great time to catch my breath and watch a little meaningless baseball as a palette cleanser before flipping the switch to the maximum-intensity world of October. So while there are some consequential games this week, this column isn’t about those. It’s about some goofy things I saw in low-stakes matchups, a player I enjoyed watching all season, and some voices that have enriched my baseball-viewing experience over the years. With my customary acknowledgment of Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized the format this column shamelessly copies, let’s get started.

1. Professional Courtesy
Baseball players on opposite teams are competitors, but they’re also workers in the same field. Yes, you’d like to beat the other team, but your counterpart on their squad is one of the people who can most relate to your daily struggles. You might compete against them 10 times a year; the other 355 days, your lives are far more alike than different. Catchers have a particular bond; let people throw projectiles right at you all day, and you’ll naturally gain a lot of respect for other people willing to do the same thing.

When the Brewers and Phillies squared off this week, the stakes were moderate. The Brewers hadn’t clinched the top overall seed yet, though they were headed there. (They did last night, when the Dodgers lost to the Padres.) The Phillies haven’t yet clinched a playoff spot, though again, the writing is on the wall. For the most part, it was a playoff tuneup for both sides. In the top of the ninth on Tuesday, with the Phillies up three and cruising home, William Contreras decided that he might as well burn a challenge:

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another episode of Baseball Writer Notices Something Totally Mundane, Starts Thinking Way Too Hard About It, and Turns it Into an Article, brought to you by FanGraphs, WGBH Boston, and Viewers Like You. I’m your host, Bob Vila.

A couple weeks ago, I was at a Phillies-Astros game where Don Mattingly chose to pinch-run for Luis Arraez with Garrett Stubbs. It’s not every day you see a catcher pinch-run for a second baseman, though it made sense for reasons I’ll get into in a second. A week later, I was at home watching a Guardians-White Sox game, and Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt inserted David Fry as a pinch-runner for Patrick Bailey in a high-leverage situation.

Fry came up as a catcher, and while he’s made a handful of appearances behind the plate this year, these days he’s more of a four-corners bat-first guy. Even so, he still runs like a catcher. Still, Vogt — who’s a good manager with exceptional analytical integration with his front office — chose to put Fry’s leaden getaway sticks on the basepaths with the division title on the line. Read the rest of this entry »