In the cat and mouse game that is the postseason, every decision matters, regardless of how big or small. If a marginal competitive advantage can be exploited, odds are a team will take their chance. Last year, I investigated what I thought was a key reason for the Astros’ postseason success over the last decade. The piece explored swing path diversity and how Houston had more of it than any other team from 2021 to 2022. Constructing a balanced, dynamic lineup is one of the tools teams can use to keep pitchers and opposing managers honest. There are multiple ways to define balance in a lineup, including swing aggression, whiff tendencies, speed and athleticism, and handedness. But that piece focused on variance in Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) within lineups.

If you aren’t familiar with VBA, it’s the vertical orientation of the bat at contact, where 45 degrees is a diagonal bat. It is pitch height dependent – the number goes down as height increases (flatter bat) and goes up as height decreases (steeper bat), making it vary within a player’s own swing profile. There is also variance player to player. On average, Aaron Judge and Freddie Freeman have much steeper barrels at impact than flatter-swinging hitters like Juan Soto and Randy Arozarena. VBA is one of multiple important bat tracking metrics — horizontal bat angle, point of contact, bat speed, acceleration, and time to contact are a few others — but VBA is the most easily accessible due to the computer vision work done at SwingGraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching playoff baseball is like cramming for a test. Most people watching are either casual fans of the sport or diehard fans of one team only, so it’s incumbent on national writers and broadcasters to get their audiences up to speed quickly. Sometimes that takes the form of an information dump; other times, a team gets distilled down to a couple of talking points. And for a team that was not expected to make the World Series, has a lot of young players, and doesn’t play in a particularly fashionable media market — like, say, the Arizona Diamondbacks — the talking points can be a little crude.

In this case, the Diamondbacks are like a preschooler on a sugar high: Young, small, and always running.

For the first five games of the NLCS, this bullet point looked a little silly, as Arizona attempted just a single stolen base against a Phillies team that holds runners well. But in Games 6 and 7, the Diamondbacks opened up the taps and reaped the rewards: eight stolen bases in eight attempts, leading directly to two runs. Which in turn led to, as you know, winning the pennant.

Can they repeat the trick against the Rangers in the World Series? Read the rest of this entry »

The World Series. It’s a playoff-capping battle that’s so iconic that other sports and activities borrow its name. The World Series of Poker, of Darts, of Snooker, the FINA Marathon Swim World Series, even briefly the World Series of Country Music Proudly Presents Stock Car Racing’s Entertainers of the Year – these events didn’t pick their name by accident, they’re basking in the glory of a long-running staple. Even as baseball matters less and less, the World Series is a big name on the marquee.

One of the best parts of playoff baseball, at least in my eyes, is that the brightest stage isn’t exclusively the domain of the top couple of teams in the game. Sure, the Dodgers and Astros have been there a lot in the last decade. Sure, the Cardinals and Yankees have a bunch of rings. But baseball is a variance-rich sport, and the playoffs are short. Make the dance and you might end up one of the last few teams standing, even if your squad doesn’t have its own wing in Cooperstown. One obvious example? This year’s clash between the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The Rangers are the closest thing we’re going to get to a postseason standby here. Sure, their last playoff appearance before this run came in 2016, but their roster is packed with playoff heroes. Corey Seager carried the Dodgers to a 2020 title. Max Scherzer seems to always be pitching in win-or-die games. Nathan Eovaldi saved Boston’s bacon in 2018 and has made a career out of coming up big in important spots. Will Smith pitched for the last two World Series winners (seriously!). Aroldis Chapman isn’t what he once was, but at his peak, he was a key figure in breaking the century-long Cubs curse. Their manager is Bruce Freaking Bochy, an October legend who has never lost a Game 7. The Rangers as a franchise might not be a World Series name brand – their trips to the Fall Classic in 2010 and 2011 ended in losses — but the ingredients are no different than what you’d expect to get in the luxury aisle. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing about playoff trends is risky business. The entire postseason, to this point, comprises 36 individual games. In the regular season, the league hit the 36-game mark on April 2. If you looked at the stolen base success rate that early into the season — 88% through those first 36 games — you’d have thought we were in for an absolute free-for-all under the new rules. Writing about individual players is even more dangerous. The most that anyone has played in this postseason is 13 games; 13 games into his season, Matt Chapman led the majors in WAR. Jorge López hadn’t given up an earned run. No one on the Rays knew what it felt like to lose a game. Mookie Betts had a 13-game stretch in mid-April where he slashed .184/.298/.306. Shohei Ohtani had a .538 OPS over 13 games in mid-May.

Nevertheless, we can’t not write about the postseason. It’s the postseason! The sample size will always be small, but we must try to make sense of it anyway, to find meaning in the small sample weirdness. And on that note, it’s time to talk about Marcus Semien. Read the rest of this entry »

When they acquired him from the Mets on July 30, the Rangers may have envisioned Max Scherzer starting Game 7 of a postseason series, but probably not under the circumstances that led to the decisive game of the ALCS against the Astros, or the early exit that followed. While Texas won in decisive fashion, the 39-year-old righty was quite shaky for the second outing in a row, and far from peak form. In context, that’s hardly a surprise given that his two ALCS starts were his first ones since being sidelined by an arm injury five weeks earlier. As the Rangers await their World Series matchup with the Diamondbacks, his performances are worth a closer look.

Scherzer left his September 12 start against the Blue Jays after 5.1 shutout innings but just 72 pitches due to what was initially termed a triceps spasm but soon revealed to be a low-grade strain of the teres major, a muscle that sits above the latissimus dorsi and attaches the scapula (shoulder blade) to the humerus (upper arm bone). At the time, Rangers general manager Chris Young was publicly pessimistic about the possibility of Scherzer pitching in the postseason if the Rangers made it, given an expected four-to-six week recovery period. “I don’t want to rule it out at this point,” he told reporters. “We’ll see where the next two weeks go and how he’s feeling. That said, it’s probably unlikely.”

Schezer didn’t pitch again in September, but he was able to play catch within a week of his injury, opening up the possibility of a return on the near side of that timeframe. While he progressed far enough to throw nearly 40 pitches in a simulated game on October 6, the Rangers left him off the Division Series roster they submitted the next day; they hardly missed him while upending the 101-win Orioles. By advancing to the ALCS, they bought Scherzer time for another simulated game before he took the ball in Game 3 on October 18 at Globe Life Field, with the team having already jumped out to a 2–0 series lead.

Understandably, Scherzer was raring to go, and he came out firing, throwing a 95-mph fastball on his first pitch to Jose Altuve, albeit slightly off the plate and outside for ball one. Working mostly around the edges of the strike zone, he sped through the inning on just eight pitches but needed nearly all of the warning track for center fielder Leody Taveras to haul in Altuve’s 100.7-mph fly ball 393 feet away from home. He struck out Michael Brantley on three pitches, the last a low-and-away curve that Brantley chased, then got Alex Bregman to fly to Taveras on a 95.7-mph fly to deep right center.

The second inning didn’t go nearly as well, and whatever Willis Reed effect Scherzer’s return might have produced quickly wore off. Over the course of 22 pitches, he hit Yordan Alvarez in the leg; struck out José Abreu looking at a 95.2-mph fastball; walked Kyle Tucker; gave up a 104.8 mph single to Mauricio Dubón on a slider at the bottom of the zone; induced Jeremy Peña to pop up; threw a wild pitch that scored Alvarez; and finally yielded a two-run single to Martín Maldonado, 101.1 mph off the bat. Fortunately for Scherzer, the slow-footed catcher was thrown out trying to advance to second base following a throw home, but for the first time in the series, the Rangers trailed.

The Astros continued to add to their lead, with Altuve leading off the third with a solo homer off a high fastball and Abreu leading off the fourth with a 112.5-mph double off a hanging slider, then coming around to score on a single by Dubón. Even while closing out his evening by striking out Peña (chasing a low curve) and Maldonado (looking at a slider on the inside corner), Scherzer had allowed five runs in four frames. He struck out four and walked only one, and while he did generate a 35% called strike and walk rate (CSW%) via eight whiffs and 14 called strikes, nine of the 12 batted balls he surrendered were hard-hit balls of 95 mph or higher, and all five hits were 101 mph or higher. Houston rockets, indeed.

Down 5–0 when Scherzer departed, the Rangers made a game of it, but lost 8–5. The Astros clawed their way back into the series, and Scherzer got the call again on Monday night. The potent Rangers offense staked him to a 3–0 lead before he even took the mound, but things didn’t go much better than in his first start; in fact, Altuve blasted his first pitch, a 93.7-mph high fastball, off the out-of-town scoreboard in left field for a ringing double. Bregman grounded out, and after Alvarez was intentionally walked, Abreu scorched a low slider down the left field line for an RBI single; all three balls were 99.9 mph off the bat or higher, if not necessarily elevated. Scherzer escaped by getting Brantley to hit into a routine 4-6-3 double play, a grounder that came off the bat at a comparatively pokey 88.3 mph. Though he was obviously on thin ice, by his own admission he kept his composure better than in Game 3, and that DP produced the game’s highest WPA (.116).

After a comparatively smooth second inning capped by another pair of back-to-back strikeouts of Peña (high 95.3-mph fastball) and Maldonado (chasing a slider in the dirt), then an Altuve groundout to start the third, Scherzer served up a middle-middle fastball to Bregman, who mashed it for a homer to left center, cutting the score to 4–2. Seven pitches later, including five straight foul balls, Alvarez reached out and drove a curveball that was well off the plate off the scoreboard for a triple. While third baseman Josh Jung’s play on an Abreu chopper prevented Alvarez from coming home, manager Bruce Bochy tabbed Jordan Montgomery — working on two days of rest — to finish the inning, which he did by getting Brantley to line out. The Rangers then broke things open with a four-run fourth inning; Montgomery added an additional two innings before Bochy turned things over to his late-inning guys, who shut the door for an 11–4 win.

For the outing, Scherzer walked two and struck out two, getting just six whiffs and four called strikes for a 23% CSW%. Six of the 10 batted balls he allowed were hit 95 mph or harder, including all four hits. All told, in his two outings he allowed seven runs via nine hits and two homers in 6.2 innings, that on the heels of an inconsistent season in which he posted his highest ERA since 2011 and the highest FIP of his 16-year career:

Batters have hit Scherzer exceptionally hard, with his xERA (which I estimated by interpolating his .395 xwOBA via the Statcast leaderboard) more than double his regular-season mark:

Via Baseball Savant, Scherzer’s .333 batting average allowed is 60 points ahead of his xBA, and his .704 slugging percentage allowed is 120 points ahead of his xSLG, but even those expected numbers yield an xERA that could be mistaken for a Boeing model.

Pitchwise, Scherzer is mustering slightly greater velocity than during the regular season, knowing he won’t have to pace himself for 90 or 100 pitches. But for the most part, his offerings are getting less spin — and here it’s worth noting that he drew a sticky stuff suspension in April — and less movement:

Those spec changes are a mixed bag. By Stuff+, for which we actually have postseason numbers to compare to his regular-season ones (which isn’t the case for PitchingBot), Scherzer’s fastball grades out out as slightly improved thanks to the velo uptick. Likewise for his cutter and change, though both have been used much less often:

The problem is that Scherzer’s breaking pitches and overall location have been worse, and while Stuff+ doesn’t account for contact, you’ve seen the damage. Broken out by pitch type, batters are connecting at averages of 94.6 mph or higher on all of them. Against the fastball, they’ve averaged 94.9 mph on the 14 they’ve connected with, for a .385 AVG and .923 SLG, and against the 12 breaking pitches they’ve made contact with, it’s .333 AVG/.583 SLG. Those two classifications account for 86% of his pitches and 87% of his contact, compared to 76% of the former and 70% of the latter. Basically, I think, he’s shortened his arsenal, becoming more predictable and less precise, and while he’s fooled some hitters some of the time, he’s paid a steep price when he hasn’t.

All of this is reading into a limited sample of data, and it’s worth noting that he faced the Astros four times between the regular season and the postseason, which may have helped them crack his codes. As a Met, he threw eight innings of one-run ball in an 11–1 rout on June 19, but he was thumped for seven runs — three via homers by Alvarez, Brantley, and Abreu, the last a grand slam — in three innings in a 12–3 loss on September 6 with the Rangers. Scherzer did face the Diamondbacks once, on July 4, surrendering four runs in six innings, three by solo homers to Corbin Carroll, Christian Walker, and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., the last two of which were back-to-back. Those two outings accounted for two of the four times he served up three or more homers in a start this year.

With Montgomery and Nathan Eovaldi likely to start the first two games of the World Series, Scherzer should have six or seven days between starts, giving him more time to rebuild strength and make adjustments. “You’re always tinkering with stuff. You’re always making little adjustments and trying to find different stuff,” he said before his first start of the ALCS. Perhaps he can summon better results and give his season a storybook ending after all.

Baseball games don’t have a single protagonist. Baseball series don’t have a single protagonist either. The vagaries of a nine-man lineup, four-man rotation, and eight-man bullpen mean that the most important moments of a series feature semi-random matchups. Bryce Harper doesn’t get to bring the ball up, call for an isolation, and try to hit a game-tying home run. You can’t game plan a high-leverage at-bat for your star. It’s just probability; the big moments can’t possibly find the same guy every time, which is what makes baseball such a team sport.

Okay, now that I’ve said that: This game was Adolis García’s game, and this series was his series. He’s been at the center of everything ever since the start of the ALCS, but particularly for the past three games. First, Bryan Abreu hit him with a pitch that emptied the benches in Game 5 and eventually led to a memorable Astros comeback from García’s own three-run homer. He came back on Sunday determined to extract vengeance, and eventually succeeded. He took 16 swings at 22 pitches, first racking up four strikeouts but then hitting a majestic, game-breaking grand slam. On Monday, he was right in the middle of things again.

In the first inning, García stepped into Cristian Javier’s nightmare: Corey Seager demolished a high fastball for a 1-0 lead, Evan Carter walked and stole second, and García was at the plate threatening to break the game open before the Astros even batted. Javier threw him a fastball roughly six inches above the top of the strike zone. But García was up there to swing, not take, and he smashed a single off the face of the left field wall to score Carter. It was more of a double and a running error if I’m being honest; García, intent on celebrating his success against the Astros to the fullest, took a leisurely look at the rapidly receding baseball before he realized it wouldn’t leave the park. He scurried to first at half speed, chagrined, before stealing second immediately. Read the rest of this entry »

In the first game of the ALCS, Yordan Alvarez struck out three times; Jordan Montgomery got him on each of those. He had a plan to contain Alvarez, you see, a glorious plan. Jeff Passan profiled it over at ESPN. Pitching Twitter, a group I mostly count myself as a part of, was in rapture. Throw to the perfect locations! Yordan can’t stand this one simple trick! Could even the fiercest batters be tamed if pitchers could only come up with a good plan?

This plan, by the way, was a great one. Alvarez isn’t bad at any part of hitting, but his eye at the plate is his least-outstanding tool. And while he’s a fearsome power hitter, he’s not equally fearsome regardless of where the ball is pitched. Here’s a chart of his career ISO (on balls in play) based on where he makes contact:

On high-and-tight pitches, he doesn’t fare well, at least compared to the rest of his work. The deep blue section low and away is less important — he usually comes up empty when he swings at those — but either high and tight or low and away look like safe harbor for opposing pitchers. Montgomery pitched to maximize these two weaknesses. He worked his batting eye with curveballs below the zone and used his sinker almost exclusively on the inner edge of the plate:

Read the rest of this entry »

Get ready to hear a whole lot about the 2019 World Series. After a 9–2 Rangers victory in Game 6 of the ALCS on Sunday night, the Rangers have evened the series at three and raised the specter that the Astros were hoping would stay buried. Game 7 will take place on Monday night in Houston, unfortunately for Houston. The Astros — the only team ever to lose all four home games in a seven-game series — now have the chance either to exorcise those demons or to relive them all over again. And pitching for Texas in Game 7 will be none other than Max Scherzer, who started Game 7 of the World Series for the Nationals back in 2019.

The Rangers, on the other hand, are looking to make their own history. While the Astros are chasing their third straight World Series appearance, Bruce Bochy’s club is looking to get there for just the third time ever. They’re also hoping to win their first championship. Read the rest of this entry »

If you came into Game 5 hoping for a pitchers’ duel between Justin Verlander and Jordan Montgomery, then this was your lucky night, for a while. The two starters traded blows for the first five innings, allowing a solo homer apiece, but otherwise made short work of the opposing lineups. Then the sixth inning rolled around and the narratives entered a tumble dryer. The game featured a little bit of everything: lead changes, defensive plays both great and terrible, bloops, blasts, backspinning bunts, and benches-clearing beanballs. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second night in a row, Houston’s bats came alive, powering the Astros to a 10-3 win in Game 4. The outcome of the game was only briefly in doubt, and by the middle innings, the Rangers had the mop-up crew on the mound to finish things off. With the series now tied at two games, the Astros have at least guaranteed that if they have to make a last stand in the ALCS, it will come back home.

Just over a day ago, the Rangers and their fans had to feel pretty good about where they stood: up two games to none, with Max Scherzer returning to start at home. ZiPS had the series at that point as nearly 80-20 in favor of Texas. The computer wasn’t working against consensus here; the simple truth of the matter is that having to win four of five games against any team is quite tricky. But the latest chapter of the Mad Max saga turned out to be a forgettable direct-to-DVD release, and Thursday night’s game was enough to put the Rangers back at square one in the ALCS.

Read the rest of this entry »