It’s likely not too many people have heard of or seen the movie Wolfs, even though it features Brad Pitt and George Clooney in a crowd-pleaser action movie, throwing witty banter at each other for two hours. However, the film dropped three weeks ago on Apple TV+. No wide release, little marketing power behind it, and available only on a streaming service that lags behind Netflix, Hulu, and other platforms. Likewise, the MLB playoff picture began to take shape around the same time, and casual fans of the sport probably hadn’t heard or seen much of the Detroit Tigers or the Cleveland Guardians, who play in the AL Central and don’t receive much national media attention.

Nevertheless, the two teams met in an ALDS that spanned the full five games. The Guardians outlasted the Tigers 7-3 in Game 5 on Saturday to earn a trip to the ALCS, where they’ll meet the New York Yankees in a best-of-seven series with a World Series berth on the line.

In Wolfs, Pitt and Clooney play fixers who are sent in to clean up messy situations created by people with enough money and power to avoid facing consequences for their actions. The two are assigned to the same job despite this being the type of work better suited to a lone wolf. The dual fixer scenario highlights how the two men who have never worked together still generally follow the same playbook. They ask the same questions, follow the same procedures, and tap into the same network of resources. Both fancy themselves not only the best at what they do, but Clooney declares, “No one can do what I do,” mere moments before another character proclaims, “No one can do what he does,” in reference to Pitt. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday afternoon, across his seven innings of shutout work against the Cleveland Guardians in Game 2 of the ALDS, Tarik Skubal threw five pitches that moved to his glove side. His other 87 pitches — fastballs, sinkers, and changeups — went the other direction. Here’s what that looked like on a pitch movement plot:

Skubal’s “Oops! no breaking balls” approach was an extreme version of the arsenal that powered his Cy Young-caliber campaign, and may well be his primary plan as he takes on the Guardians in Game 5 of the ALDS on Saturday. Unlike most of our contemporary aces, Skubal doesn’t dominate with huge shapes or funky angles. There are no Sale-esque sweepers, knee-buckling splitters, gravity-defying heaters, or mind-meltingly flat vertical approach angles. Few pitchers thrive while concentrating 95% of their pitches in one quadrant of the pitch plot. But Skubal does. He excels by pitching like a turbocharged Kyle Freeland. Read the rest of this entry »

The postseason is at its most fun when both teams have something to prove. The ZiPS projections may have been bullish on the Cleveland Guardians coming into the season, but the computer was in the minority, with most observers thinking the Minnesota Twins were the clear favorites in the division. The Guardians are no longer the habitual losers they were from the 1960s-80s, but their last World Series championship was still in 1948. For their part, the Detroit Tigers dominated the AL Central 15 years ago, but lost both of their World Series, dropping eight of nine games. And Detroit wasn’t even supposed to be here; the team traded Jack Flaherty at the deadline and if someone had bowled them over with an offer, Tarik Skubal might be wearing a different uniform this month.

Game 4 was do or die for Cleveland, with the Tigers’ plan of “Tarik Skubal and then pitching chaos” winning two of the first three games. With a bullpen whose second-half performance led the American League with a 2.50 ERA and 3.0 WAR (the Tigers weren’t far behind with a 3.00 ERA and 2.8 WAR), the Guardians had high hopes that they’d be able to send the ALDS back to Cleveland for one winner-take-all showdown. And that’s precisely what they did, winning a closely fought game that was one of the most entertaining we’ve seen so far this October.

Cleveland struck first and in old-school fashion, with a single and a stolen base from Steven Kwan, and singles by Kyle Manzardo and Lane Thomas, the latter of which scored Kwan. But Will Brennan’s groundout on a low changeup allowed Detroit starter Reese Olson to escape the first having only surrendered one run. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re into relief pitching and pinch-hitting, boy was Game 3 of the ALDS between the Cleveland Guardians and the Detroit Tigers the game for you. On the surface, it was fairly straightforward, a low-scoring affair that featured good pitching and a couple of timely hits. But look beneath the surface and you’ll see that it was quite a quirky game, one that would be difficult to explain to casuals (not derogatory!). Why was a healthy hitter pulled before he got an at-bat? Why did one of the biggest offensive threats on the Tigers get pulled in the fifth inning? Truly, it was a dream game if you love talking about the intricacies of baseball with your friends. And lucky for me, you’re all my friends today.

Let’s establish a few of the details before we dive into some of the nerdier aspects of Wednesday’s game. The Tigers won 3-0 to take a 2-1 series lead against their division rivals. Just as he had the last few months, A.J. Hinch put his faith in his bullpen, a unit that posted a 3.00 ERA (fourth in the game) in the second half as the Tigers put together the best record in the American League over that stretch. They delievered another superlative performance, and now his team has a chance to close out a playoff series at home Thursday night. Imagine telling Tigers fans that was possible in July!

There are 26 players on each of these flawed but fun AL Central rosters. Realistically, four of those 52 players (the starting pitchers from Games 1 and 2) weren’t going to appear in Game 3 unless it went a gazillion innings, leaving 48 who might see action. The Tigers used six pitchers and the Guardians used seven. Both teams used three pinch-hitters, while the Guardians also called on Austin Hedges as a defensive replacement (he ended up getting an at-bat), making for seven total substitutions between the two teams. Add those hurlers and pinch-hitters to each team’s starting lineup, and you end up with a whopping 38 players used! Not quite every player, but for a nine-inning game, that’s a lot! And all that mixing and matching added a fascinating dimension to the chess game, especially the pinch-hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

Riley Greene has never seen the ball like this before. You never know how someone will react to their first postseason experience – players have been known to press or freeze up – but Greene has done no such thing. He’s chasing pitches outside the strike zone about as frequently as he did in the regular season. Meanwhile, he’s locked in when pitchers challenge him. He’s swinging at 85% of pitches in the strike zone, up from about 66% during the regular season. And when he gets one right down the middle, he’s going for it: He’s taken 13 swings at 15 such pitches, also an 85% swing rate, up from 73% before October.

Just one problem: Greene is hitting .133/.278/.200 in the playoffs. He’s walking at about the same clip, and his strikeouts are barely down. Meanwhile, his power has completely disappeared. He has one extra-base hit, a double. He hasn’t barreled up a single ball. His bat speed is down two ticks from the regular season, and down nearly 2.5 mph from his second-half mark. He’s making more weak contact and less hard contact. These things don’t quite make sense together. Are we looking at a fluke of batted ball luck or a trend?

Now, let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s probably at least partly a fluke of batted ball luck. We’re talking about four games here, 18 plate appearances. You’re not supposed to read too much into samples that small, and if you do, you should focus on the most stable indicators you can find. On-base percentage? Slugging? Heck, strikeout rate? We haven’t seen nearly enough to take those at face value. But I do think something’s wrong, so I thought I’d dig a little deeper. Read the rest of this entry »

Every pitcher starts an at-bat with a plan of some sort. Usually, they execute the plan. But sometimes the plan goes awry. And the plan definitely went awry when Emmanuel Clase faced Kerry Carpenter in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the Tigers-Guardians ALDS.

Oh, I leave quite an impression

423 feet to be exact! #ALDS pic.twitter.com/yq6k6Fvss1

— MLB (@MLB) October 7, 2024

On the sixth pitch of the plate appearance, Carpenter uncorked a massive blast off Clase to give the Tigers a late 3-0 lead. A half-inning later, and Detroit had the series tied up at one game apiece. It was the hardest hit ball that Clase had ever given up. It was the first home run this season he’d allowed to a lefty. He allowed five earned runs the entire regular season; on that chuck alone, he gave up three. Read the rest of this entry »

After the Detroit Tigers beat the Houston Astros in the opener of their Wild Card series, I wrote that while Tarik Skubal wasn’t perfect, he was very good, and that was enough to lead his team to a 3-1 win. The same was true in Game 2 of the ALDS, although this time he wasn’t the biggest story. On an afternoon where the ace left-hander hurled seven scoreless innings, Kerry Carpenter came off the bench and hit the biggest home run of his life against a lights-out closer. When the dust had settled, the Tigers had evened their series against the Cleveland Guardians at one game apiece with a 3-0 win.

The matchup between Skubal and Matthew Boyd offered both a contrast in styles and, at least on paper, a mismatch. After undergoing Tommy John surgery last year, the 33-year-old Boyd wasn’t offered a major league contract during the offseason, and he remained unsigned until June, when he signed a one-year deal with Cleveland for an undisclosed salary. He appeared in only eight big league games during the regular season. As it turned out, Boyd ended up matching this season’s likely American League Cy Young winner pitch-for-pitch for four-plus innings before the Guardians turned to what has been baseball’s best bullpen this season.

The early frames accentuated the contrast in styles. Through three innings, Boyd relied heavily on soft stuff, throwing more changeups than fastballs, while Skubal relied primarily on high-90s heaters, mostly leaving his own plus changeup in his back pocket. Hitters on both sides were left floundering. By the time the Guardians batted in the bottom of the fifth, the Tigers had the game’s only four hits, and one of them was of the infield-dribbler variety. Read the rest of this entry »

Justyn-Henry Malloy was in the Atlanta Braves organization when he appeared as a guest on FanGraphs Audio in October 2022, this while finishing up his first full professional season in the Arizona Fall League. He became a Tiger soon thereafter. In early December of that year, Detroit acquired the now-24-year-old outfielder, along with Jake Higginbotham, in exchange for Joe Jiménez.

Then a promising-yet-unpolished 2021 sixth-round pick out of Georgia Tech, Malloy was described in our trade recap as possessing “a combination of power and patience.” It was the latter that stood out most. Plate discipline was the youngster’s carrying tool, as evidenced by a .438 OBP as a collegian and a .408 OBP across three levels in the minors. Despite a higher-than-ideal strikeout rate and questions about his defensive future — he’d recently transitioned to left field from the hot corner — Malloy seemed well positioned to join a young Tigers lineup in the coming seasons.

He arrived, at least in part, this summer. After doing his thing in Toledo — his stat line with the Triple-A Mud Hens this season included a .403 OBP and a 129 wRC+ — Malloy made his MLB debut in early June, and with the exception of brief demotion in late August remained on the roster throughout. His numbers were admittedly not great. In 230 plate appearances against big-league pitching he slashed just .203/.291/.366 with eight home runs. Moreover, a pedestrian 10% walk rate belied the discerning-eye approach that helped him get there.

How different is the present day Justin-Henry Malloy from the up-and-coming prospect I’d talked to two years ago? I asked him that question when the Tigers played in Chicago on the final weekend of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

They played nine innings in Cleveland on Saturday afternoon. They really did, a whole baseball game’s worth of innings, but Game 1 of the American League Divisional Series between the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Guardians was decided long before all that. The game wasn’t just over after the first inning; it was over before the Tigers had so much as pitched a third of a frame. It’s one of baseball’s quirks that we measure pitching performance in innings pitched, which is to say by the number of outs recorded. There are plenty of stats that make more sense if we use total batters faced as the denominator, and that’s before you think about the occasional outing in which the pitcher doesn’t record an out. Dividing by zero doesn’t really work, and on Saturday, no one was more acutely aware of that bleak mathematical reality than Tyler Holton, Detroit’s starter (or opener, or — maybe more accurately — sacrificial lamb), who had the first no-out outing of his short career.

Last week, A.J. Hinch described his pitching strategy as “Tarik Skubal tomorrow and pitching chaos the rest of the way.” With Skubal lined up to start Game 2, Saturday was a day for chaos. Holton ran a 2.19 ERA over 93 1/3 innings this season, putting up 1.4 WAR. He gave up just five total runs in the second half, and not all of them were earned. But his name didn’t even appear in Jake Mailhot’s series preview. I point that out not to malign Jake, but to emphasize the sheer volume of excellent Tigers relievers that both we and the Guardians need to keep track of in this series. There were so many that Detroit’s Game 1 starter (or opener, or losing pitcher) didn’t even rate a sentence.

One of the more depressing things about chaos theory is that it’s almost entirely devoted to explaining that what looks like chaos is actually just complexity. So much of the randomness, disorder, and inexplicability that we humans find so compelling can actually be explained in mathematical terms that make us want to repeatedly bang our foreheads against the nearest school desk. It’s all about understanding the initial conditions so that you can see how each action affected the system as a whole.

The initial conditions in Cleveland were lovely. It was bright and sunny, 68 degrees at game time. In Tanner Bibee, the Guardians had their ace on the mound, well rested and coming off a September in which he ran a 2.64 ERA. The last time he didn’t leave a game with more strikeouts than innings pitched was August 11. The Tigers, with Skubal lined up to pitch in Game 2 and 5, were starting out with house money. Hinch could organize his chaos just how he liked, and for the second game in a row, he led off with Holton.

Bibee had some ugly misses in the top of the first, letting his fastball sail way above the zone and to his arm side. It could have been nerves, but either way, he was able to locate his slider in the zone. Still, after he struck out Parker Meadows swinging on a changeup, Kerry Carpenter stayed back on a curveball and drove it up the middle for a line drive single, and for a moment it looked like Bibee’s wildness might end up costing Cleveland. Matt Vierling hit a soft chopper to second base for a fielder’s choice, moving Meadows to second, then Bibee hit Riley Greene in the front foot with a curveball, prompting an early mound visit from pitching coach Carl Willis and a brief infield huddle. Whatever Willis said worked just fine. Colt Keith lined out to left field to end the top of the first. It was the last time the Guardians would have anything to worry about.

In the bottom of the inning, Holton started Steven Kwan with sinker off the plate outside. That would be the high point of the day for the Tigers; a 1-0 count on Steven Kwan was as good as it got, the initial condition from which all ensuing calamities cascaded. Kwan ripped Holton’s second pitch, a sinker off the plate inside, off the top of the right field wall for a double, missing a homer by a foot or so. David Fry took Holton to a full count, then fouled off a cutter and a changeup before earning a walk.

With no outs and runners on first and second, superstar José Ramírez came to the plate. Things couldn’t have looked better for Cleveland, but their luck would only improve. Ramírez chopped the ball down the third base line, and the topspin seemed to confuse Zach McKinstry. What looked like a high but routine bounce completely flummoxed him. He just kind of whiffed on it, so handcuffed that he never made a real attempt to catch the ball or even get in front of it. Kwan came around to score on the error, and the Guardians had runners on second and third with no outs.

The Tigers brought their infield in, and their luck didn’t change. The left-handed Josh Naylor rolled over a sweeper, slipping a soft grounder neatly between the first and second basemen to score Fry. That was the end of Holton’s day. He threw 20 pitches and surrendered one hard-hit ball. He allowed three hits, one walk, and one batter to reach on an error. He did not retire a batter.

For the first time all year, Reese Olson entered the game as a reliever instead of a starter. Olson didn’t have Holton’s season, but he still managed a 3.53 ERA and 3.17 FIP over 22 starts, racking up 2.4 WAR in the process. The first postseason pitch of his career was a slider. It was also the first postseason pitch of Lane Thomas’s career. It brings me no joy to report that for the next few days, you will necessarily be hearing the phrase “Lane Train” more often than you would like to hear it, which – and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here – is exactly zero times. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Thomas was sitting slider. He demolished the pitch, launching it 394 feet into left field to make it 5-0.

Remember, the Tigers had yet to record an out at this point. Four of those five runs belonged to Holton, making his ERA for the game four divided by zero times nine.

Olson eventually made his way out of the inning, and then a bunch of people started singing about colon cancer screenings. One of their neighbors was wielding hedge trimmers. He was finishing off a topiary of an anthropomorphic box in which you can mail a stool sample to the company that made the people start singing about their colons. The real CGI box just kind of stood there next to its horticultural doppelgänger, seemingly not at all surprised to be looking into its own eyes, only in the form of a bush. Somehow, it felt of a piece with the baseball that preceded it.

After that, Olson settled down beautifully. He pitched five innings, allowing just two more hits and a walk. Ty Madden would relieve him in the sixth, surrendering two more runs to make it 7-0 Guardians. That’s how the game would end. Despite a few more ugly misses in the early innings, Bibee would cruise through 4 1/3, surrendering just four hits and a walk while striking out six Tigers.

All season, Cleveland’s bullpen has been the opposite of chaos. Stephen Vogt’s crew has been running like clockwork, and that continued in Game 1. Cade Smith followed Bibee, striking out all four batters he faced. Tim Herrin struck out two more in the seventh, Hunter Gaddis worked a clean eighth, and Emmanuel Clase needed just eight pitches to shut the door in the ninth, giving the Guardians the victory and a 1-0 lead in the series.

You could argue that the Tigers needed this game much less than the Guardians. They’ve got Skubal going in Game 2, and he’s lined up for Game 5. They came into the game wanting to win, sure, but also thinking that they’d be happy to steal just one of out of their three potential chaos contests. However, after seeing how that went, the Tigers must be discouraged. Save for one pitch, they wasted a brilliant bulk-relief appearance from Olson, and their offense mustered just four hits while striking out 13 times. If chaos really is just unpredictability that can be unraveled if you math hard enough based on how things start, Detroit might need a new plan.

After dispatching the Houston Astros in a two-game Wild Card sweep, the Detroit Tigers’ magical season — their playoff odds sat at just 0.2% on August 11 — continues with a matchup against the Cleveland Guardians in the ALDS. For its part, Cleveland emerged as the winner of the surprisingly tough AL Central, the team’s second division title in the last three years. The Guardians flirted with the best record in the American League for most of the season, but a slow July and August meant that they finished a game and half behind the Yankees for the top seed; they ultimately outperformed their BaseRuns record by 11 games, by far the widest differential in baseball this year, on the back of clutch hitting and a shutdown bullpen.

These two division rivals are well acquainted with each other — Cleveland eked out the regular season series 7-6 — but this will be the first time these storied franchises have met in the postseason. Both teams are extremely young and neither had especially lofty expectations entering the season, but here they are, battling for a spot in the ALCS.

As was true in the Wild Card round, one of the primary questions for the Tigers is how they will deploy their pitching. They got a brilliant start from Tarik Skubal in Game 1 in Houston, then bullpenned their way through Game 2 with the help of seven different pitchers. Now the challenge is figuring out how to take the unorthodox approach that got them through the end of the regular season and past the Astros, and adapt it for the Division Series. Fortunately, the postseason schedule means that Skubal should get two opportunities to pitch this series if it goes all the way to five games, but what they do for the other three games is anyone’s guess.

Both Reese Olson and Casey Mize were on the Wild Card roster, and Detroit will probably bring Keider Montero back for the Division Series. Still, Olson hasn’t pitched past the fourth inning in any of his three regular season starts since returning from a shoulder injury a few weeks ago. Mize, meanwhile, was an effective starter for the Tigers for most of the first half of the season, but missed two months with a hamstring injury and was used as a piggyback option in two of Olson’s starts in late September. The ZiPS game-by-game odds assume that Olson will “start” Game 1, with Montero going in Game 3 and a bullpen game for Game 4:

As you can see, if the Tigers are able to force a Game 5, the series is essentially a coin flip, with the odds slightly favoring Detroit thanks to Skubal. The trick will be to win Skubal’s starts and at least one of Games 1, 3, or 4. Of course, no matter who is listed as the official starter in the non-Skubal games, the Tigers will almost certainly use every available reliever to work through those games. In the Wild Card series, they used eight pitchers out of their bullpen between the two games, with Jason Foley and Jackson Jobe the only ones to allow any runs. Will Vest and Beau Brieske were the standouts, pitching in both games and each earning a save.

The Guardians won’t have to scramble quite as hard to find starters, but the rotation certainly isn’t the main strength of Cleveland’s roster. After Shane Bieber was sidelined by Tommy John surgery in April, Tanner Bibee became the de facto ace of the staff, turning in a solid effort (3.47 ERA, 3.56 FIP, 3.3 WAR) in his second big league season. He improved his strikeout rate by more than two percentage points, lowered his walk rate by 1.5 points, and was a reliable workhorse the entire season. His slider and changeup are both legitimate bat-missing weapons, and his fastball is just good enough to support those secondary pitches.

After Bibee in Game 1, things become a little less clear. Matthew Boyd will certainly make at least one start during the series, and potentially two if Cleveland opts to use him in Game 2 (which would line him up to start a potential Game 5). Boyd returned from Tommy John surgery in August and made eight very impressive starts down the stretch. His fastball velocity is sitting right around where it was at his peak with the Tigers, and his secondary offerings are generating plenty of swings and misses.

For Game 3, the Guardians have a number of options to turn to. The game-by-game odds above assume Alex Cobb will be activated off the IL for this series and make the start, but he’s only made three starts all year and just one in September after dealing with blisters on his throwing hand. Gavin Williams has electric stuff to go along with his prospect pedigree, but he’s struggled with inconsistency, particularly with runners on base, leading to a 4.86 ERA that’s more than a run higher than his 3.67 FIP. There’s also the veteran Ben Lively, whose 3.81 ERA and 4.66 FIP across 29 starts gave Cleveland’s rotation some stability after Bieber’s injury, but he’s not exactly the kind of starter you’d want pitching in a big postseason game. However they lineup their rotation, it’ll be a lot more predictable than the chaos Detroit is trying to harness.

Of course, the Guardians’ true strength lies in their bullpen. Led by Emmanuel Clase, who just had one of the best reliever seasons ever, Cleveland also has a deep stable of setup men who form a bridge from the middle innings to the ninth:

Cade Smith, Hunter Gaddis, and Tim Herrin are as good a setup trio as there is in baseball, and Cleveland’s relief corps as a whole had the sixth-best league- and park-adjusted ERA among the 750 team seasons since 2000. The same expanded schedule that benefits the Tigers’ heavy bullpen usage will also allow manager Stephen Vogt to deploy his ‘pen aggressively should the Guardians take an early lead.

The x-factor on the Guards’ pitching staff is Joey Cantillo, their 13th-ranked prospect. He made his major league debut in late July and has shown some real promise with his changeup and slider, especially across four September starts that saw him pitch to an impressive 2.25 ERA and 1.17 FIP with 29 strikeouts in 20 innings. It’s possible they’ll use him as their Game 3 starter, but it’s more likely that they’ll deploy him as another multi-inning weapon out of the bullpen.

Not only do the Guardians have the more impressive bullpen, they also employ the series’ biggest superstar in José Ramírez. He was a double and a home run away from posting a 40 double, 40 home run, 40 stolen base season, and will certainly receive down-ballot MVP consideration behind Aaron Judge and Bobby Witt Jr. Despite his fantastic track record in the regular season since his breakout 2016, Ramírez has had a rough go of things in the postseason. In 134 plate appearances across 32 playoff games, he’s slashed just .242/.291/.347 (a 70 wRC+) with a pair of home runs. If Cleveland wants to make a deep run in the playoffs, Ramírez will need to be firing on all cylinders.

Steven Kwan and Josh Naylor are the other key members of the Guardians lineup, with the former posting an excellent 131 wRC+ from the leadoff spot while the latter blasted 31 home runs and collected 108 RBIs from the cleanup spot. Both Kwan and Naylor hit left-handed, which puts them at a disadvantage against Skubal. That’s one reason why Cleveland acquired Lane Thomas from the Nationals at the trade deadline — to balance out the lineup with a strong right-handed batter. Thomas got off to a slow start with his new team in August, but produced a 137 wRC+ during the final month of the season.

Cleveland will also hope to see more consistent production out of Jhonkensy Noel. He slumped pretty badly in September, but he was a key member of the lineup during his hot August. His huge raw power gives Cleveland something it has largely lacked the last few years, and one swing from “Big Christmas” could change an entire game.

Because the Tigers will be looking to exploit as many matchups as they can with their relievers, Cleveland’s bench will bear a lot of weight this series:

David Fry, Cleveland’s surprise All-Star, should get starts against the left-handed Skubal, with Noel in the outfield. Beyond those two straight platoons, Vogt will need to pick and choose the right moments to deploy his pinch-hitters to counter A.J. Hinch’s bullpen machinations. The switch-hitting Angel Martínez, in particular, could be the most valuable piece off Cleveland’s bench.

In my preview of the Tigers-Astros Wild Card series, I wrote that Detroit’s offense would need to rely on four key contributors: Kerry Carpenter, Parker Meadows, Riley Greene, and Spencer Torkelson. That quartet collected just four combined hits against Houston, though Meadows’ home run in Game 2 broke the scoreless tie and Carpenter’s single in the eighth started the game-winning rally. Behind those four, the rest of the Tigers lineup collected 13 hits against the Astros, with Torkelson and Colt Keith the only batters to go hitless in the series. Timely hitting was the differentiator; all three runs in Game 1, as well as Andy Ibáñez’s go-ahead, three-run double in Game 2, came with two outs in their respective innings. The Tigers also left a combined 19 runners on base during the series, squandering a number of opportunities to tack a few more crooked numbers on the scoreboard.

The blueprint for both the Tigers and Guardians should look pretty similar: scratch across a few runs early in the game and hand things off to a shut-down bullpen to close things out. With both teams working from the same plan, the series will likely come down to which club can find a timely hit to put themselves ahead. The moves both managers make will have a huge influence on the course of the series. Hinch’s bullpen management has been pretty flawless so far; Vogt will have his own bullpen to manage, along with a bench that should see heavy usage. For fans of nuanced baseball strategy, this series should prove to be a fascinating matchup.