Baseball is a funny game, a remarkable and even ridiculous one for the way it can produce such radically different games on consecutive nights as in Games 3 and 4 of this year’s World Series. On Tuesday, Bryce Harper and friends hit five home runs at the expense of Lance McCullers Jr., accounting for all of the runs in the Phillies’ 7-0 romp. On Wednesday, Cristian Javier and three Astros relievers produced the first combined no-hitter in postseason history while winning 5-0, with all five runs coming within a seven-batter span in the fifth inning. From talk about how devastated the Astros might be and the possibility of the Phillies closing things out at home, the conversation turns to whether the Phillies can bounce back before the series, now knotted at two games apiece, shifts back to Houston.

Combined or not, the no-hitter is The Big Story, and rightly so, as it’s just the second of any kind in World Series history after Don Larsen‘s 1956 perfect game, and the third in postseason history, with Roy Halladay’s 2010 Division Series no-hitter the other. Halladay did so for the Phillies, at Citizens Bank Park, against the Dusty Baker-managed Reds, by the way. Of course there’s the fact that Javier, the majors’ toughest pitcher to hit in terms of both batting average (.169) and BABIP (.228) among those with at least 140 innings pitched, had already done the heavy lifting in a combined no-hitter on June 25 of this year against the Yankees.

What you might not have noticed about Wednesday’s game was that the Astros won without the benefit of a home run, a feat that hadn’t happened since October 15, when the Guardians and Padres both won Division Series contests (Game 3 for the AL, Game 4 for the NL) while keeping the ball in the park. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – Momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher, and once Cristian Javier is in motion, he tends not to stop. The 25-year-old, nominally Houston’s no. 4 starter, had one of the best high-stakes starts you’ll ever see. He and three relievers threw the second no-hitter in World Series history, and the first combined no-hitter in any round of the MLB playoffs.

Just 24 hours ago the Phillies teed off on Lance McCullers Jr., sending 45,000 fans at Citizens Bank Park into a lusty froth. Five home runs for the Phillies and an offensive no-show from the Astros made an upset run to a title seem as real a possibility as ever. But Javier and the Astros came back with a vengeance, giving as good as they got and then some to win 5-0 and level the series.

Astros right-hander Ryan Pressly, who closed out the game, called Javier one of the most underrated starters in baseball.

“There’s not a moment that’s big enough [for him],” Pressly said. “He just goes out there and does what he wants to do… He doesn’t get the credit [for] how he goes out there and handles his business. The lights aren’t big enough. I mean, we’re on the biggest stage in baseball and he goes out there and does what he normally does.” Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – It’s not just that Bryce Harper homered on the first pitch he saw in Game 3. For a first-pitch home run to put his team up in the first inning of his first career home World Series game — and a 402-foot bomb at that — it was a pretty casual event on Harper’s end. Almost nonchalant. This is what he does:

But when he got back to the dugout, he shouted for Alec Bohm, the on-deck hitter, to come back to him. It was reminiscent of the famous shot of Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman chatting in the on-deck circle as the Astros teed off on Tyler Glasnow in Game 5 of the 2019 ALDS. Bohm led off the next inning and hit the first pitch he saw into the left field seats.

If you’d turned off the game then, you would’ve seen a representative sample of what turned into a 7-0 rout. The Astros couldn’t get out of first gear against Ranger Suárez and the four relievers who followed him. And while Lance McCullers Jr. threw the kitchen sink at the Phillies, he got the sink, the faucet, and the backsplash kicked right back at him. Philadelphia managed six hits and a walk against the veteran right-hander, but five of those six hits were home runs and every single baserunner scored. Read the rest of this entry »

All day, the weather radar predicted that the skies would open at a particularly inconvenient time for the Phillies and Astros. While MLB waited as long as it could to see if the wind shifted, by 7 p.m. local time, it was clear the weather would not cooperate. (Rain in late October in the Mid-Atlantic region? Whoever could have foreseen such a thing?) As such, Game 3 of the World Series has been postponed 24 hours, with better weather ahead; the nighttime forecasts for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are for clear skies and temperatures in the 50s and 60s. Ideal Fall Classic weather, in other words.

Game 3 of the #WorldSeries has officially been postponed. Here is an updated look at the Series schedule:
– Game 3: Tuesday
– Game 4: Wednesday
– Game 5: Thursday
– Travel Day: Friday
– Game 6 (If Necessary): Saturday
– Game 7 (If Necessary): Sunday pic.twitter.com/a61nzKUBM5

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 31, 2022

Moreover, if neither team sweeps all three games in Philadelphia, the scheduled off day between Games 5 and 6 will remain intact. That pushes a potential Game 6 to Saturday night and Game 7 to Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Framber Valdez isn’t the marquee pitcher in this World Series. He’s a solid fourth by reputation, with the top trio some of the brightest pitching lights of the last five years: Justin Verlander, Aaron Nola, and Zack Wheeler. Two games into the series, that top trio have been uniformly bad. Each has given up five runs, hardly the dominant performances they’re known for. Valdez? He stands untouched and mostly unchallenged, allowing a solitary run over 6 1/3 innings to pace the Astros to a 5-2 victory in Game 2.

When Valdez is on his game – and he’s always on his game, setting the major league record for most consecutive quality starts this year – he mixes a snapdragon curveball with a sinker that warps gravity, drawing the ball inexorably downward. He was in fine form Saturday night against a tough Philadelphia lineup. He got awkward swings seemingly at will, weak grounders whenever he needed them, and had a beautiful curveball in his back pocket whenever the opportunity for a strikeout presented itself.

The Phillies have been swinging early and often this postseason. That’s a horrid plan against Valdez; his biggest weakness is an occasional lapse in command. Even tonight, in one of the best performances of his career, he walked three Phillies. If you can lay off his curveball – easier said than done – he’ll sometimes spray a few sinkers and put you on base. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first three rounds of the playoffs, two competing storylines took shape: The Astros, indomitable, sheared through the American League undefeated. The Phillies, resilient, ebullient, and unpredictable, shocked the National League by dominating the senior circuit’s best.

When these two narratives finally intersected in Houston Friday night, spraying hits and disorder all over the field like debris from a train crash, the result was an instant classic. The Astros dominated early, staking out an early five-run lead that by all rights ought to have demoralized their opposition. But the Phillies, a $255 million monument to not knowing when you’re beaten, struck right back for a historic comeback win:

How historic? The Phillies’ 6-5 win was the biggest comeback by an NL team in the World Series since 1956. When Houston’s win probability peaked with one out in the top of the fourth, they were roughly 16-to-1 favorites to win the game. Instead, the Phillies erased that lead in two innings, hung around long enough for J.T. Realmuto to win the game in the top of the 10th, and survived a Houston rally that came within 180 feet of turning a series-changing Phillies win into a crushing loss. Read the rest of this entry »

In this year’s regular season, games took a pretty pronounced step away from three true outcomes hitting. Home runs dropped from 3.3% of plate appearances in 2021 to 2.9%, walks from 8.7% to 8.2%, and strikeouts — this one in part thanks to replacing nearly 5,000 pitcher plate appearances with designated hitters — fell from 23.2% to 22.4%. All told, the percentage of plate appearances winding up in one of these results dropped 1.7 percentage points, from 35.1% to 33.4% — the most profound drop since 1988.

There are a lot of theories as to why this could be happening, from the universal designated hitter to more changes in the balls to humidors, but the fact is, after this figure dropped nearly one percentage point from the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to ’21, this year marks the second of a league-wide trend away from the trio. Which makes it all the more fun that when the Phillies and Astros take the field in Houston tonight for Game 1 of the World Series, it will be National League home run and strikeout champion Kyle Schwarber digging in to lead off the Fall Classic.

In his first season in Philadelphia this year, Schwarber was as much of a three true outcomes hitter as there was. No other player this season finished in the 90th percentile or above in home run rate and walk rate and in the bottom 10th in strikeout rate. That isn’t to say there aren’t other players in that mold; indeed, there are many. Giancarlo Stanton and Eugenio Suárez hit 31 home runs apiece and both finished in the bottom 10% in strikeout rate but landed in the second decile in walk rate. Max Muncy, who led off a World Series in 2018, leans pretty heavily in that direction. Matt Chapman, Daniel Vogelbach, and Joey Gallo all fit the bill to some degree, the latter most prototypically in previous seasons. But in 2022, nobody took it to the extreme that Schwarber did; he hit more home runs than anyone other than Aaron Judge, led the majors with 200 strikeouts, and finished sixth with 86 walks. While about a third of PA league-wide ended in one of the true outcomes, just about half — 49.6% — of Schwarber’s did. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve takes off, running as fast as he can down the line. The throw is coming in faster, sailing toward the bag. You can tell it’s going to be a close call, and indeed it is. The umpire extends his arms, signaling safe, and the crowd erupts into either emphatic cheers or cacophonous boos, depending on whether this hypothetical call takes place in Houston or Philadelphia. The whole play lasts only a few short seconds, but it’s one of the most thrilling moments of the entire game.

What I am describing is an infield hit — one of the most overlooked plays in baseball. It’s not surprising that home runs, extra-base hits and the like get a little more attention, especially since infield hits are just as often the result of poor defense or a lucky bounce as they are the result of true offensive skill. Yet as individual plays, infield singles are exactly what make baseball so exciting. There are few batted ball events as highly suspenseful as those in which an infield hit is possible. Those four to five seconds between the contact and the call can get your heart racing nearly as fast as the runner himself. Infield hits represent a true battle between batter, fielder, and even the field itself. On top of that, the ever-present possibility of an infield single is exactly what makes every routine ground ball worth watching.

This year, we have the privilege of watching two of the very best infield hitters in the game face off in the World Series. Altuve and Jean Segura are the active leaders in infield hits, the former with 247 and the latter right behind him with 244. They both passed Elvis Andrus on the active leaderboard this season, who himself reached the top of the leaderboard when Hunter Pence retired in 2020. FanGraphs began tracking infield hits in 2002, and in that time Segura and Altuve each rank among the top ten. Both just 32 years old, they have plenty of time to climb the ranks, too. Within a few years, they should find themselves second and third behind only infield hit god Ichiro Suzuki. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to a moment to appreciate how they both got here. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello there! Here’s a graph.

Were you not geared up for such a quick graph? Did I blow it right by you? That was kind of the point. The graph shows the run value of fastballs, bucketed in 1-mph increments. Over the past four seasons, for every 100 fastballs thrown, one tick of velocity has been worth roughly an eighth of a run. The lesson? Throw your fastballs fast.

I’ll stick to fastballs in this article, but I should mention that harder soft stuff is also associated with better outcomes, though the correlation is weaker and the effect is less dramatic. My number crunching indicates that over 100 breaking and offspeed pitches, an extra mile per hour is worth roughly 1/16 of a run. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Astros face the Phillies in the World Series on Friday, they’ll have their hands full with a team that’s in the middle of a miracle run to the final round of the playoffs. And while Philadelphia’s lineup has plenty of potent hitters in it, if the Astros want to win their second championship in franchise history, they’ll need to have a solid plan to deal with the hottest hitter of the postseason: Bryce Harper.

Just to review: Harper has reached base in all 11 games he’s played in this postseason and collected seven multi-hit games, 11 extra-base hits, five home runs, and a 1.351 OPS that would stand as the eighth best in a single postseason in MLB history. The game-winning home run he hit in Game 5 of the NLCS is already the stuff of legends, earning him NLCS MVP honors.

That we’re seeing Harper at the height of his powers comes as somewhat of a surprise; this season hasn’t been easy for him. An elbow injury suffered in early April relegated him to designated hitting duty for nearly the entire season. An errant fastball from Blake Snell fractured his thumb in late June, costing him two months on the injured list. He wasn’t his normal self after returning from that stint on the sidelines: In 151 plate appearances from August 26 through the end of the season, he posted a meager .227/.325/.352 slash line, good for an 83 wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »