The pivotal and most crucial decision of Game 5 of the World Series was attended by a wave of boos, even as Dave Roberts got it right.

Amid the carnage and chaos at the end of Game 4 a scant 20 hours prior was the realization that the fulcrum of the series was now the left arm of Clayton Kershaw. That he would be the man on the mound was already known, as he’d been announced as the scheduled starter for Game 5 well before then, but the circumstances surrounding his turn swung as sharply as Game 4 itself. In the moments before Brett Phillips overturned the world, Kershaw was going to take the mound as the man to end Los Angeles’ three-decade run without a title. In the moments after, he became the man who would have to overcome his checkered postseason past to break the deadlock and put the Dodgers on the doorstep of a championship. If he couldn’t, Los Angeles would be facing the end of the road in Game 6.

It’s both unfair and tiresome that the playoffs always seem to swing around Kershaw, but he warps the series around him, a gravity well that sucks up matter and turns it into white-hot takes. There’s also the fact that the Clayton Kershaw Postseason Narrative™ has, for the most part, accurately reflected his October body of work, full of struggles and heartbreaking losses. The irony of these playoffs is that, one weak NLCS start aside, Kershaw has looked more like his regular-season self. Coming into Game 5, his 2020 postseason body of work consisted of eight runs allowed in 25 innings — a 2.88 ERA — and 31 strikeouts, and he was superb in Game 1, holding the Rays to one run in six innings. This is the Kershaw we all know and love. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2004 movie Primer is widely considered the most complicated movie plot of all time. Two engineers travel back in time again — and again — and maybe before?? — and again in an attempt to mold events to their own benefit. It’s a truly ridiculous, convoluted mess — and it pales in comparison to what the Dodgers and Rays did last night in Game 4 of the World Series.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Ryan Yarbrough took the mound for the Rays, on three days’ rest after a relief appearance in the first game of the series, and he wasn’t sharp. He surrendered solo home runs to Justin Turner and Corey Seager, and scattered three other hits and a walk while striking out only one batter. He was out of the game in the top of the fourth.

Julio Urías, his counterpart, flirted with brilliance. He struck out nine Rays out of the 18 he faced, bullying the opposing lineup to the tune of 20 swinging strikes. Tampa Bay whiffed 17 times on his fastball alone, and his curveball accounted for another 10 called strikes. Naturally, the Rays tagged him for two home runs — a Randy Arozarena first-pitch ambush and a full-count moonshot from Hunter Renfroe. The Dodgers had added a run in the top of the fifth, so Urías left with a 3-2 lead.

LA added another run in the sixth inning,, and the game felt like it might start getting away from Tampa Bay in a hurry. The Dodgers bullpen isn’t airtight, but the Rays’ own bullpen hadn’t been able to slow down opposing hitters all series, and they were running out of good options to fill innings. What was the offense going to do, score six runs in four innings or something? Read the rest of this entry »

Brad Keller had a boffo season for the Kansas City Royals, and his slider was a big reason why. Buoyed largely by its improvement, the 25-year-old right-hander logged a 2.47 ERA and a 3.43 FIP over nine starts covering 54-and-two-thirds innings. Five times, Keller worked five or more scoreless frames, a complete-game shutout in mid-September serving as his shining-star effort.

Helped by pitching coach Cal Eldred, he jumpstarted his career by developing more depth during his pandemic-forced downtime.

“We made some adjustments during the shutdown,” Keller told me following the completion of the season. “Between spring training and spring training 2.0 we made some mechanical adjustments that allowed my arm to become more athletic, if that makes sense. That’s kind of a weird way to put it, but whenever I would throw my slider in the past, I’d almost block my arm out. We were like, ‘OK, we don’t do that on a fastball, we don’t do that on anything else, so let’s do that same thing on the slider.” Basically, I needed to start throwing my slider just like I throw my fastball.”

The adjustment took time to bear fruit. Initially, the pitch wasn’t breaking at all. As Keller put it, “the very first one almost took the catcher’s head off,” as it was devoid of downward movement. Diligence, accompanied by a Rapsodo and an Edgertronic, eventually did the trick. Once mundane, his slider morphed into a monster.

“With the help of analytics, it became like my fastball for a longer time toward the plate,” explained Keller. “The spin went up. It became sharper, and as a result I started getting some silly swings-and-misses on it.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking about distance a lot lately. The space we must keep from each other, the proximity of the most turbulent election of our lifetimes, and how the former often exacerbates the stress of the latter.

Baseball cannot provide a complete escape, of course, and the specter of distance loomed again prior to the start of Game 3. Just before first pitch, I couldn’t help but wince as the camera panned around a not particularly distanced crowd under the roof of Globe Life Field. Responsible countries with far fewer cases have maintained much stricter attendance measures at sporting events. Here in the U.S., there may be good reasons to allow 11,447 people into a big league ballpark right now, but they evade me.

To add another uncomfortable variable, a rainy forecast prompted the powers that be to close Globe Life Park’s retractable roof. I’m not really sure whether the closure made the stadium any more dangerous, but it certainly couldn’t have helped. At least one writer stayed away from the pressbox, though the roof did nothing to diminish gatherings down the first and third base lines. With cases spiking around the country — up 21% in Texas over the past week — Tom Verducci’s hasty declaration that the league had concluded fans were no less safe with the roof closed didn’t inspire much confidence. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, Nick Anderson hung a curveball. Will Smith greeted it rudely:

Two batters later, Anderson faced Edwin Ríos with a chance to get out of the inning. As Eric Longenhagen noted on our Twitch stream at the time, Anderson hung another one:

Luckily for the Rays, Ríos didn’t quite time that one up. Anderson followed it up with another curve, which bounced, and he escaped the inning. Things could have gone much worse, however, and Eric and I mused that Anderson might want to take a look at what was causing his pitches to float in like that.

It seems pretty obvious that Anderson’s breaking ball, a biting snapdragon that seems to pack two inches of horizontal break into the last 10 feet of its homeward path, is at its best when it drops most. There’s only one problem with that theory: the data. Take a look at Anderson’s curve in 2019, broken up into quartiles based on vertical break:

Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to Game 2 of the World Series, there was little ambiguity about how Brandon Lowe’s 2020 postseason had gone. He was dreadful, owning a .107/.180/.161 slash line over 61 plate appearances with just one home run. To say the least, Tampa Bay had expected more from him — with 2.3 WAR in the regular season, he was the Rays’ most valuable player, in addition to leading the team in a host of offensive categories. His manager, Kevin Cash, continued not only to play him every day, but position him prominently at the top of the lineup. But with one disappointing series after another, he was quickly running out of time to make a positive impact.

Mercifully, that extended slump fell by the wayside on Wednesday. Lowe homered twice and drove in three runs against Dodgers pitchers, as the Rays defeated Los Angeles 6-4 and knotted the series up at a game apiece. The two sides will take a day off before reconvening Friday, with Los Angeles right-hander Walker Buehler scheduled to face Tampa Bay righty Charlie Morton.

Wednesday’s tilt had a dramatically different feel from the previous evening’s Game 1, when the Dodgers rode a dominant starting pitching performance and an offensive surge in the middle innings to an impressive victory. Los Angeles tapped right-handed rookie Tony Gonsolin as its Game 2 starter, just two days after he’d thrown two innings in a relief appearance during Game 7 of the NLCS. The decision to use Gonsolin, as opposed to Buehler on three days rest, was a signal that the Dodgers were comfortable relying upon their relievers to throw a large chunk of Game 2 — it was just unclear when we’d see them. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays made it to the World Series for a lot of reasons, but one of them is indisputably their bullpen, which has given Kevin Cash the flexibility to pull starters whenever he wants and follow them with an unending stream of hard-to-hit relievers. Cash, in turn, has used it masterfully; he’s pushed the right button at seemingly every turn. Last night, I think that might have changed.

In the top of the fifth inning, Tyler Glasnow couldn’t find the zone. He walked the first two batters he faced, allowed two runs (on a fielder’s choice that didn’t get anyone and a single), and generally looked gassed. Cash went to his reserves and brought in Ryan Yarbrough.

That sounds like a reasonable usage choice, but it’s simply not how Yarbrough is deployed most of the time. Here are the particulars of his previous playoff appearances this year:

Okay, there have only been two of them, but he’s been used as either a starter or a bulk guy in both. He throws a near-starter number of pitches and faces a small sliver of the lineup a third time through. That’s similar to his usage this regular season:

Mostly starts, with a few relief appearances thrown in. It’s not unreasonable that the Rays might want to turn him into more of a reliever in the World Series, the only round of the playoffs with off days, but 19 pitches? Four batters faced? The last time he faced four or fewer batters in the regular season was July 13, 2018. He had two short appearances to only one extended stint in last year’s ALDS, but that was part of a gambit to use a true bullpen game (Diego Castillo drew a start) with Yarbrough handling two innings, then use him as a LOOGY in two other games.

Yarbrough is essentially a starter. We had him penciled in for Game 4 of the World Series, something which would be tricky now; that would be on three days’ rest, and while he only threw 19 pitches, it’s still a disruption to his routine. The Rays still could use him there, but I think that game is now more likely to be a bullpen game with perhaps two innings out of Yarbrough. Glasnow, Snell, and Morton would then each draw two starts to fill out the full complement of seven games. Read the rest of this entry »

On the opening night of the 2020 World Series, a puzzled nation watched a flagging starter get lit up as he passed the 100-pitch mark and asked, “Why are they leaving that guy in there? He’s cooked!” To the relief of Dodgers fans, the subject in question wasn’t Clayton Kershaw. The three-time Cy Young winner with the rocky postseason record pitched at the top of his game on Tuesday night, dominating the Rays while the Dodgers lineup waited out opposite number Tyler Glasnow and erupted for eight runs in the middle innings. The Dodgers cruised to an 8-3 victory.

Kershaw’s three previous starts of this postseason had offered a classic case of diminishing returns. After spinning eight innings of three-hit shutout ball while striking out a career postseason-high 13 Brewers in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series, he allowed three runs in six innings in Game 2 of the Division Series against the Padres, the last two via back-to-back solo homers by Manny Machado and Eric Hosmer as they faced Kershaw for the third time. In his NLCS Game 4 start against the Braves, which had been pushed back two days due to back spasms, Kershaw allowed just one run and four hits over the first five innings and 61 pitches, but when the lineup turned over, the dangerous Ronald Acuña Jr., Freddie Freeman, and Marcell Ozuna all reached base — the last two via balls hit at 105 mph or higher — opening the floodgates to a seven-run inning in what became a 10-2 rout.

From the Dodgers’ side, this outing was hardly as fraught. While Kershaw allowed two of the first three Rays he faced to reach base via a Yandy Díaz single and a Randy Arozarena walk, he struck out Hunter Renfroe on a curveball in the dirt — his only swing and miss from among his 20 first-inning pitches — and made a good defensive play on a Manuel Margot dribbler to escape. That began a run of 13 straight Rays retired; he didn’t need more than 14 pitches in any of his other five innings, and three times needed 11 or fewer. His 92.5 mph first-inning fastball velocity boded well; it was just 0.1 off his season high, set in that Wild Card Series start, and matched his Division Series start. By comparison, he was at a season-low 90.7 mph in the first inning of his NLCS start. Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Dodgers completed their three-game NLCS comeback on Sunday night, beating the Atlanta Braves to reach their third World Series in four years. Joining the Dodgers in Texas will be the Tampa Bay Rays, who avoided an embarrassing four-game reverse sweep at the hands of the Houston Astros by the skin of their teeth the day before. In what will hopefully prove to be 2020’s final mischievous prank, the most unorthodox season in baseball history has ended up with the most orthodox result: despite a 16-team playoff format that held little advantage for the top seeds, the World Series matchup features the clubs with the best records in their respective leagues. For both, a championship would end significant droughts, as the Dodgers have not won a Fall Classic since 1988, and the Rays have yet to grab a title since at least the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

Fittingly in a matchup of the two best teams, ZiPS sees the win probabilities as very close, with the Dodgers squeezing out a slight 53%-47% edge in the projections. But while these squads may be similar in their quality, they approach baseball’s financial world quite differently; the Dodgers are big spenders while the Rays regularly have a payrolls that rank near the bottom of the league. With the outcome squarely in the realm of coin flip, small things will likely decide the series winner. To that end, I’ve outlined seven questions, the answers to which will determine how fate conducts its deliberations. Read the rest of this entry »

On a Rays team that’s long on talent but short on household names, Randy Arozarena has carved out an identity with a postseason for the ages. The 25-year-old left fielder, who has just 99 regular season plate appearances in his brief career, became the first rookie position player to win a League Championship Series MVP award via his four-homer, nine-hit performance against the Astros. He now has seven homers in this postseason, one short of a record, not to mention a prominent place on the leaderboards of a few other categories.

Arozarena’s final homer of the ALCS was a two-run first-inning shot off Lance McCullers Jr. in Game 7, giving the Rays a lead that they would not relinquish. That followed his game-tying solo homer off Framber Valdez in the fourth inning of Game 1, his two-run shot off Zack Greinke in the fourth inning of Game 4, and his solo dinger off Enoli Paredes in the fifth inning of Game 5. Here’s the supercut:

For the series, Arozarena collected five other hits as well, and batted .321/.367/.786 while driving in six runs. In winning LCS MVP honors, he joined the Orioles’ Mike Boddicker (1983 ALCS), the Marlins’ Livan Hernandez (1997 NCS), and the Cardinals’ Michael Wacha (2013 NLCS) — all pitchers — as the only rookies to win the award; Hernandez also won the World Series MVP award, lest Arozarena need to set another goal. They don’t give Division Series MVP awards, but his .421/.476/.895 showing with three home runs against the Yankees, and for that matter his .500/.556/1.000 performance in the Wild Card Series against the Blue Jays, might have garnered him additional hardware. The dude is en fuego, hitting a combined .382/.433/.855 through 60 postseason plate appearances, with 11 of his 21 hits going for extra bases (three doubles, one triple, seven homers). He’s tied for fourth in homers in a single postseason:

Read the rest of this entry »