Well folks, that’s what we call a pitcher’s duel. I don’t think there’s a universal definition for the term, but Wikipedia tells me it’s when both starting pitchers allow very few runners to reach base. That seems about right! Zack Wheeler and Yu Darvish both came up big Tuesday night in San Diego, with each starter limiting the success of the opposing team’s hitters after each offense had put up an incredible performance in their respective Division Series. As the game progressed, both attacked their foes with a variety of pitches spread across the zone. Neither was predictable, and neither gave their manager much reason to remove them, but one made a few more mistakes in a few more at-bats than the other. Those mistakes ended up being the difference in the game.

To understand exactly what happened in those at-bats — specifically, why the batter was successful — it helps to know what happened with each pitch and what the pitcher-catcher tandem’s potential thought process was for each of them. John Smoltz always sprinkles in tidbits about pitch sequencing that are worth listening to when he broadcasts a game. It’s easier said than done, but a pitcher holding back some pieces of their repertoire until later in the game — or say, a hitter’s third at-bat — is a good way to maximize deception. If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about that, it’s Darvish. Darvish’s never-ending pitch mix allows him to change how he attacks hitters as the game progresses. In his first battle against Bryce Harper, he opted for a three-pitch mix and attacked Harper in the zone. No nibbling the first time around:

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Did anybody out there have this one? None of us did. While it’s not altogether surprising that either the Padres or the Phillies, two very good teams, made it this deep into the postseason, it’s incredible that both of them have, considering who they had to go through to get here. While a handful of the FanGraphs staff members picked the Padres to beat the Mets in the Wild Card Series, none of us picked them to beat the Dodgers, and even though the vast majority of us thought the Phillies would dispatch the Cardinals, only two of us picked them to beat Atlanta.

This seems foolish in hindsight, especially as it pertains to the Padres. They have a dangerous heart of the order led by MVP candidate Manny Machado and young star Juan Soto, who is starting to heat up. Neither Max Scherzer nor Spencer Strider seemed 100% in their respective postseason outings (key details that allow for some amount of site-wide absolution), making the Padres the lone NL postseason team with three totally healthy premium starting pitchers in Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, and Joe Musgrove. Their bridge to Josh Hader — Robert Suarez and Luis García in high-leverage spots, Tim Hill as a lefty specialist and Steven Wilson as a mid-90s/slider middle inning rock — might be the best relief corps of the remaining playoff teams, depending on whether you value depth (Houston’s bullpen takes the cake in this department) or peak individual nastiness ceiling (give me the Padres or Guardians). Despite Fernando Tatis Jr.’s suspension and a difficult playoff draw, San Diego has now bested the two teams that spent most of the calendar atop the National League and now enjoys home field advantage in a League Championship Series.

The Phillies are also playing with house money. If you had listened to Philadelphia sports talk radio in August (I was visiting home and fell off the wagon), you’d have thought the Phillies were an awful team rather than a good one that’s simply somewhat incomplete. Even though they (along with the Padres) kind of backed into the playoffs, the depth of their lineup and their two elite starters were obviously enough to make them dangerous in October, and in two playoff series those traits were sufficient to overcome a middling bullpen (which may or may not be without veteran David Robertson again in the NLCS) and bad team defense. With the NLCS set to get underway on Tuesday, we’re no more than a week and a half away from one of these two clubs punching a World Series ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you eat the bear. Sometimes, the bear eats you.

And at still other times, you eat it against the left center field wall. For the second day in a row Michael Harris II, who despite his youth is already one of the best defensive outfielders in the game, came off worse in a confrontation with a fence. On Friday night, the W.B. Mason sign knocked the ball out of his mitt, turning what would’ve been a spectacular catch into an RBI double for Bryce Harper. And not 24 hours later, Harris, the ball, and a neighboring State Farm ad came together to produce an inside-the-park home run for J.T. Realmuto.

With an 8–3 win in front of a bloodthirsty home crowd, the Phillies completed an upset victory over the rival Braves and are on their way to the NLCS. The inside-the-park home run wasn’t the play that made the game; in fact, by win probability, it was only the fourth-most impactful dinger of the afternoon. But if you watch enough baseball, you’ll learn to recognize signs that this just isn’t your day. For the Braves, surrendering the first inside-the-park homer by a catcher in postseason history, minutes after their starter got knocked out of the game by a line drive… signs don’t come much clearer than that. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not just that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. It’s that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. Rhys Hoskins would’ve spiked his bat through the ground if he were able.

“I didn’t know what I did until a couple innings later,” Hoskins said after the game. “It’s just something that came out, just raw. But God, it was fun.”

A celebration that emphatic isn’t about happiness, or excitement, or even a desire to get one over on one’s opponent. It’s about catharsis — for Hoskins, his teammates — now a game from the Phillies’ first NLCS since 2010 — and many thousands of their most ardent, and nervous, admirers.

There’s an iron law of Philadelphia sports, little known outside the region but cited frequently within it. As articulated by Twitter user @historiancole: “Philadelphia only has two speeds: cocky or distraught.” This postulate is the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle tweet of Hoagieland; it comes up whenever the lead changes in a Phillies game, the Sixers update their injury report, or the Eagles do anything at any time. It captures the duality of the high-leverage sports experience: exuberance when things are going well, counterbalanced by abject terror that everything will fall apart.

For 11 years, Phillies fans have felt little but pessimism; long gone are the days when they dominated the National League the way the Dodgers do now. In between the team has suffered the slow recognition that a rebuild was necessary, the utter failure to execute that rebuild, and years of futile attempts to patch the wreckage into a playoff team. The 45,538 unfortunates who packed themselves into Citizens Bank Park on Friday afternoon know every contour of this story, and from it they’ve learned to expect the worst. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching an elite starting pitcher at his best can be one of the most exciting things in baseball. Many are familiar with the feeling that no matter who the batter in the box is, the pitcher’s stuff is simply too much to handle, and he’ll be easily set down. But as we all know, not every start ends in a shutout or no-hitter; it can quickly go south no matter how long the hurler has been cruising. After setting down the first six Phillies he faced in NLDS Game 3, Spencer Strider looked more unbeatable than ever. But just a few hitters later, his night would be over, with the game — and potentially the series — out of reach for Atlanta.

The Braves’ announcement that Strider would be the Game 3 starter with Charlie Morton getting the ball for Game 4 said a lot about their expectations from the pitching staff. Strider last pitched on September 18, missing the past month with an oblique injury; starting him the day after Thursday’s scheduled off-day suggested Atlanta might be strictly managing his workload. After all, with relievers like Raisel Iglesias and Collin McHugh who have made multi-inning high-leverage appearances in the past, the Braves were set up well to have their bullpen eat up lots of outs in a close game.

Through the first two innings on Friday, Strider looked like the ace we had seen all season. His fastball touched triple digits, he struck out three, and most impressively, he racked up ten swinging strikes in just six batters. But he opened the third inning with a four-pitch walk to Brandon Marsh, then fought through a long matchup with Jean Segura, who struck out on eight pitches. Next up was nine-hole hitter Bryson Stott, who fouled off four consecutive fastballs in a two-strike count before smashing a slider for a double into right field, scoring Marsh and giving the Phillies a 1–0 lead. Throughout, Strider was showing signs of slowing down. While he sat in the 98–99 mph velocity range for the first two innings, his first three pitches to Stott were thrown at 96, and he missed his spot outside five times. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday afternoon in Atlanta, José Alvarado asked the Truist Park grounds crew to make some adjustments to the mound, waving off the ensuing chirps from the Braves’ dugout. According to him, Max Fried, the Game 1 starter, had dug out a small pocket at the front of the hill with his delivery; the Phillies’ lefty wanted to avoid tripping over the hole and injuring himself.

Explained in such a way, it sounds like a reasonable thing to ask for. It would be hard to pitch if you’re constantly worried about stumbling and breaking an ankle; it would be much harder to pitch with a broken ankle. Yet even so, it’s not that often you see a reliever ask the grounds crew to touch up the mound. Alvarado, however, has developed a habit of making such a request. Clearly, he is someone who likes to feel in complete control.

It’s hard to blame him for feeling that way. Control is the one thing that has eluded Alvarado throughout his career — he’s consistently inconsistent, you might say. But when he does have proper control of his pitches, he can be an elite bullpen arm. That’s been the case for a long time. Back in 2017, when FanGraphs ranked him as the no. 28 prospect in the Tampa Bay Rays system, Eric Longenhagen praised his “monster stuff” but warned of his “potentially fatal command issues.” Four seasons later, when Alvarado was traded to Philadelphia, Eric once again remarked on his “elite-level stuff” but “frustrating control.” Read the rest of this entry »

If Phillies fans had known three days ago that their squad would leave Atlanta with a split, they’d all have told you that was swell. It felt as though they were playing with house money after surviving a late onslaught by a Braves lineup that squandered two woulda-coulda-shoulda, difference-making bases loaded situations in Game 1 and escaping with the victory, and they had both Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola looming for the next two games. But at the mercy of Kyle Wright and Atlanta’s bullpen King Ghidorah of A.J. Minter, Raisel Iglesias, and Kenley Jansen, the Phillies were shut out in Game 2, sent packing in a 3–0 loss which didn’t even last as long (two hours and 49 minutes) as the rain delay that preceded it.

While leaving the den of the defending World Series champions even at a game a piece is, in a vacuum, a huge positive for the Phillies, the context of this split is somewhat alarming. The Braves have outscored them 8–1 over the last 14 innings, as Philadelphia mustered just three hits in this shutout loss. A masterful performance by Wright and opportunistic hitting in the sixth inning were pretty much all of what Atlanta needed to tie the series.

Wheeler largely performed as expected for most of the game. Second among big league starters in WAR across the last two seasons, he needed just 27 pitches to knife through three perfect innings at the start, his adrenaline-boosted fastball velocity a full tick above his 2022 regular-season mark. It’s especially encouraging to see that arm strength given that he is just a few starts removed from coming off the IL with forearm tendinitis.

It wasn’t until the sixth, thanks to some self-inflicted damage on Wheeler’s part, that the Braves broke through in a two-out rally. After he dispatched Marcell Ozuna and Eddie Rosario to start the inning, the righty hit Ronald Acuña Jr. with a fastball, resulting in a lengthy delay so the trainer could check on Acuña. (You know what it’s like to hit your funny bone on the door frame? Imagine the door frame is moving at 97 mph.) Read the rest of this entry »

Before Tuesday, this postseason had been a tale of a starting pitcher renaissance, with over a third of the starters in the Wild Card round authoring shutout performances. It was a good bet that we would see more of the same in this season’s first playoff game between the Phillies and Braves, the majors’ second- and seventh-ranked teams, respectively, in starter WAR. Yet neither Max Fried nor Ranger Suárez made it out of the fourth inning, garnering just 10 outs apiece on a warm, sunny day in Atlanta.

Fried didn’t look right from the outset. In his shortest start since April of 2021, his velocity was down across the board. With the exception of his curveball, all of his other pitches saw decreased spin as well, and for some, less movement, too. Fried dealt with similar dips in his last start, but he was also coping with illness. Today’s loss of crispness comes with no such caveat, not to mention six extra days of rest. Read the rest of this entry »

Decision-making in the playoffs is a micro-focused as you can imagine. The level of preparation which goes into these games will never be fully known in the public sphere, but if a team wants even the slightest competitive edge, you better believe the details are as granular as the fine sands of Puerto Rico’s Playa Negrita.

Every opposing hitter has a zone and/or pitch that is a weak spot. You must know who on your pitching staff is best suited to throw to those weaknesses, and what hitters are most adaptable to use pitch sequences that will play to those same weaknesses. The following matchups are a few areas that could sway any given game in either direction. They are certainly not the only of high importance, but the statistical or situational holes make them worth mentioning. I’ll go through series by series and pick one that deserves attention, starting with the Yankees against the Guardians.

Guardians’ offense vs. Yankees’ sinkerballers

The Yankees’ bullpen is loaded with turbo sinkers and groundball pitchers. Lou Trivino, Jonathan Loáisiga, and Clay Holmes, to name a few, all feature a sinker as their primary fastball. Each of them will be used in high-leverage scenarios against any layer of the Guardians’ lineup, which has been the very worst in the American League against the sinker, posting the second-lowest wOBA (.317) and the lowest xwOBA (.319).

There’s plenty to suggest the Yankees’ bullpen will give the Guardians issues. Because of those turbo sinkers, New York’s bullpen led all of baseball in GB% (49.1%) and Run Value (-20.3 runs). The next best in both categories was Baltimore, which trailed in each by a decent margin (1.5 percentage points and 1.9 runs). In today’s game, being better than every team at throwing sinkers provides a significant competitive advantage, as it keeps batted balls out of the air and on the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League’s adoption of the designated hitter this season eliminated the most noticeable difference between it and the American League. Now, the National League is what makes grown men in scarves weep on public transit, and the American League comes with a slice of melted cheese on top. (No, I have not updated my pop culture references since 2009, and I have no plans to do so.)

The only remaining difference is that the AL gets an extra off day during the Division Series. MLB announced in August that contrary to prior practice, the Division Series would no longer have a travel day between Games 4 and 5. But while the NL would play two games, get a day off, and then play three in a row, the American League gets an extra day off without travel between Games 1 and 2.

When the league announced this new scheme, an obvious question occurred to my colleague Dan Szymborski: How would this affect pitcher usage? Previously, a Division Series contestant could run four pitchers on full rest, and have both its Game 1 and Game 2 starter on full rest for the decisive match, if necessary. Or it could bring back its Game 1 starter on short rest for Game 4, and have everyone else start in order on regular rest. Moving or eliminating the off day throws that practice into chaos. Read the rest of this entry »