The wild card round is already short enough, and this year, all four matchups ended in sweeps. That’s not much postseason baseball for the Rays, Blue Jays, Brewers, and Marlins. Suffice it to say, none of those teams took October, despite what the t-shirts promised.

While I feel a twinge of heartache for the losing side in any postseason matchup, I feel especially bad for the first-round exits. After a 162-game slog with the playoffs as the only goal, their season is over in the blink of an eye. With time, some will be forgotten as contenders entirely. That seems a shame, considering how well each of these teams performed in the regular season.

With that in mind, I wanted to take one last moment to recognize the playoff performances of Miami, Milwaukee, Toronto, and Tampa Bay, before the winds of the postseason blow on to the Division Series matchups. To be clear, there isn’t a ton to celebrate; they were each swept, after all. Still, every eliminated team had at least one player whose postseason showing deserves a pat on the back. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to rank each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Coverage of the Twins’ sweep of the Blue Jays focused on Carlos Correa’s crafty veteran playoff leadership, but Royce Lewis, Pablo López, and Jhoan Duran were key parts of Minnesota’s victory too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Correa is important because he’s a great player and great leader, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers locked up their first postseason series since 2016 with an exclamation point, once again dominating the Tampa Bay Rays, this time by a score of 7-1. Nathan Eovaldi shook off his late-season struggles to deliver a masterclass, while Corey Seager and Josh Jung chipped in a pair of doubles each (with the latter also adding a triple), and Adolis García and Evan Carter went deep. For the Rays, this marked their third season in a row of playoff disappointment, and while they won’t sit atop the list of postseason scoreless streaks after Curtis Mead’s RBI single in the seventh, they’ll head into the offseason with more question marks than they’ve had in recent memory.

After the lefty Jordan Montgomery shut them down in Game One, the Rays made a couple of notable changes in advance of facing the right-handed Eovaldi. First, they shed the Devil Rays uniforms that may have doomed them to the fate of their World Series-less ancestors. Second, and more directly in response to yesterday’s events, they swapped the recently returned Jose Siri — who made critical errors on both sides of the ball yesterday — for the left-handed hitting Josh Lowe, shifting Manuel Margot from right field to center in order to accommodate him. Read the rest of this entry »

Extremes in defense were on display as the Wild Card round kicked off on Tuesday afternoon. In the Rangers-Rays opener, Texas left fielder Evan Carter laid out for a great catch of an Isaac Paredes line drive in the first inning, starter Jordan Montgomery dove to make an impressive snag of Jose Siri’s popped-up bunt in the second, and Josh Jung made a nice grab on Manuel Margot’s soft liner in the seventh. On the other side, Siri’s day from hell continued as he missed catching Corey Seager’s wall-banging double in the fifth, then deflected and briefly lost control of a Seager bloop before airmailing it over third base in the sixth, costing the Rays a run. And misery loves company — his Rays teammates made three additional errors in their 4-0 loss.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, center fielder Michael A. Taylor made a pair of exceptional catches, and Carlos Correa saved a run in the fourth by fielding a dribbler that had gone under third baseman Jorge Polanco’s glove, making a sidearm throw home while on the run to keep Bo Bichette from scoring. Read the rest of this entry »

Well that was decisive. The Texas Rangers dominated the first contest of their Wild Card Series in all three phases of the game. Bruce Bochy’s club outhit, outpitched, and absolutely out-defended the Tampa Bay Rays en route to a 4-0 victory. If baseball involved special teams, they surely would’ve crushed Tampa on that front too. Fresh off the best season of his seven-year career, Jordan Montgomery silenced a Rays team whose 118 wRC+ was second in the majors only to Atlanta’s this year, and whose 120 wRC+ against left-handed pitching ranked fourth. Meanwhile, the Tampa defense, which ranked 18th on our leaderboard this season, set a franchise single-game postseason record with four errors.

Surprising no one, Randy Arozarena’s playoff heroics continued, as he went 2-for-4 with a double. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much help, as the rest of the team notched just four hits.

Defense was the story from the very beginning of the game, overshadowing an impressive performance from ace Tyler Glasnow. Clad in their fun (but possibly cursed) throwback Devil Rays uniforms, Tampa Bay made three errors in the first three innings. Although none of them led directly to a run, they did contribute to Glasnow’s rising pitch count; he needed 51 pitches to get through those first three frames. And it wasn’t just the errors. There were several plays, some of them very tough but all of them makable, that the Rays just couldn’t come up with. Corey Seager, batting second, reached on an error by first baseman Yandy Díaz in the first. Glasnow was able to work through the mistake, striking out the last two batters of the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite being second and third in record among AL clubs and sporting the top two run differentials in the Junior Circuit, the Rays and Rangers will meet in the wild card round as the fourth and fifth seeds, respectively. Tampa Bay secured the top wild card spot after losing a close division race, finishing just two games behind the first-place Orioles, the only 100-win team in the AL, and will play host to the Rangers. Their 90 wins tied them with the Astros for first place in the West, but they lost the division crown via tiebreaker under the new rules that sent Game 163 into extinction. These two squads may be a bit above the caliber of the average wild card series, but only one will be on a flight to Baltimore this weekend for the ALDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in August, my colleague Ben Clemens crafted an article titled Wait, Zack Littell is a Starter Now?! It was an apt headline. Not only had the 27-year-old right-hander been DFA’d by the Red Sox a few months earlier — Boston having been his third organization in as many years, and his sixth overall — he’d logged a 4.08 ERA over 145 big-league appearances, all but four out of the bullpen, with just three saves. As Clemens pointed out, Littell “wasn’t even a dominant reliever.”

Of course, this was the Tampa Bay Rays who’d moved him into their rotation. Much for that reason, Clemens qualified his skepticism by saying, “What else can we do but wait and see the results?”

The results have remained largely positive. Littell has a not-so-great 6.75 ERA in 14 appearances out of the bullpen this year, but in the same number of outings as a starter his ERA is 3.41. Moreover, he’s consistently gone five-plus innings. As Rays beat writer Marc Topkin told me for an article that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. the under-the-radar righty “has basically saved the starting rotation.”

How did the opportunity come about? Read the rest of this entry »

“Let’s Talk About Underrated 2023 Orioles” was the subtitle of my Sunday Notes column on September 10, with the opening section having featured a combination of Baltimore broadcasters and scribes opining on that very topic. Today, we’ll head south and talk about underrated Tampa Bay Rays — arguably an even more subjective exercise. Few teams in any sport have enjoyed as much success while getting contributions from as many players who largely fly under the radar from a national perspective.

The six people quoted below — four Tampa Bay broadcasters and a pair of the team’s beat writers — offered their perspectives on Wednesday when the Rays played the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

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Brian Anderson, Rays broadcaster:

“The guy who had the big game tonight: Josh Lowe. Coming into the season, it was Vidal Bruján, Jonathan Aranda, Luke Raley, and Josh Lowe — those four guys for two spots — and it was a battle right to the end of spring training. Raley and Lowe got them. Not only did [Lowe] fight for a roster spot and get it, he turned it into .290 with 20 home runs, and he’s 32-for-35 in stolen bases. He’s third on the team in runs driven in. He plays a good outfield. I mean, he’s gone through the roof for a guy who, until the end of camp, didn’t know if he was going to make the team or not. To be able to do what he did… I don’t think anyone saw him putting together the kind of year he’s put together.” Read the rest of this entry »

In many aspects of the game, Harold Ramírez simply doesn’t look like a big leaguer. His 47.5% chase rate ranks 193rd out of the 194 hitters with at least 400 plate appearances this year. Among that same population, his line drive rate ranks in the 14th percentile. Ramírez hits twice as many groundballs as fly balls and has homered in just 2% of his plate appearances, worse than league average. As a DH, he doesn’t provide value with his glove, and in his first two full seasons with Miami and Cleveland, he was worse than replacement level.

Now let’s talk about how good Ramírez is. He has some of the best raw power in the game, once hitting a ball 114.8 mph, something the likes of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and José Ramírez have never accomplished. He avoids strikeouts at an above-average clip and can make the most of the balls he puts in play as a 64th-percentile runner. Ramírez is one of just three hitters with a batting average above .300 in each of the past two seasons, along with Freeman and Luis Arraez. Read the rest of this entry »