No-Hitters Are Great, but the Long Ball Still Wins in October

Baseball is a funny game, a remarkable and even ridiculous one for the way it can produce such radically different games on consecutive nights as in Games 3 and 4 of this year’s World Series. On Tuesday, Bryce Harper and friends hit five home runs at the expense of Lance McCullers Jr., accounting for all of the runs in the Phillies’ 7-0 romp. On Wednesday, Cristian Javier and three Astros relievers produced the first combined no-hitter in postseason history while winning 5-0, with all five runs coming within a seven-batter span in the fifth inning. From talk about how devastated the Astros might be and the possibility of the Phillies closing things out at home, the conversation turns to whether the Phillies can bounce back before the series, now knotted at two games apiece, shifts back to Houston.

Combined or not, the no-hitter is The Big Story, and rightly so, as it’s just the second of any kind in World Series history after Don Larsen‘s 1956 perfect game, and the third in postseason history, with Roy Halladay’s 2010 Division Series no-hitter the other. Halladay did so for the Phillies, at Citizens Bank Park, against the Dusty Baker-managed Reds, by the way. Of course there’s the fact that Javier, the majors’ toughest pitcher to hit in terms of both batting average (.169) and BABIP (.228) among those with at least 140 innings pitched, had already done the heavy lifting in a combined no-hitter on June 25 of this year against the Yankees.

What you might not have noticed about Wednesday’s game was that the Astros won without the benefit of a home run, a feat that hadn’t happened since October 15, when the Guardians and Padres both won Division Series contests (Game 3 for the AL, Game 4 for the NL) while keeping the ball in the park.

The Astros BABIP-ing the Phillies into submission — single, single, single, hit-by-pitch, double, sacrifice fly, single — was the exception. The postseason is home run season, and for all of the stern lectures about the importance of playing fundamentally sound baseball by hitting to the opposite field, moving the runner over, yadda yadda yadda, the stark reality is that in the constricted offensive environment of October, it takes the long ball to win. To invoke a phrase favored by my former Baseball Prospectus colleague Joe Sheehan, “Ball go far, team go far.”

Teams that have gone homerless have won just seven times in 25 tries (out of 76 total postseason games) this postseason, and they’ve scored barely over two runs per game while doing so; remember, these stats also include the homerless, scoreless, and of course hitless Phillies from Wednesday night. That .280 winning percentage is lower than homerless teams in this year’s regular season (.331, 595-1205) but higher than the entire span of the 2015-22 postseason, the period for which I’ve explored postseason trends in starting and relief pitching:

Teams that go homerless have won less than 25% of their games over the past eight postseasons. Even hitting one homer only makes those games a coin toss, though such teams have fared slightly better in the 2022 regular season (.510, 855-822), and better than that this fall (.593, from the first table). As batting averages and scoring levels shrink, the importance of home runs is magnified.

This isn’t a new finding. Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver knew this when Bill James was still the night watchman at a pork and beans cannery in Kansas, and Sheehan and his BP colleagues and successors did their part in disseminating and amplifying it. Ben Lindbergh dug in on this a decade ago and the topic has been revisited time and again, but it never hurts to apply a fresh coat of paint. Tuesday’s five-homer onslaught — Five-Homer Onslaught is also the name of my other band, by the way, and no, we don’t have any hit singles — put me in the mood to dig into the stuff, which only made the baseball gods chuckle by supplying Wednesday night’s remarkable result.

It usually doesn’t work out quite this neatly, but this year, the final four teams standing had the highest rates of homers per postseason game, and that’s even with the Yankees being swept out of the ALCS:

Of course, it helps that the Yankees and Astros finished first and second in the AL in homers during the regular season. The Phillies were fourth in the NL, while the Padres (who actually tied with the long-gone Braves for fourth) were just 12th due in part to the difficulty of homering in Petco Park. General managers build power-hitting teams because that’s what wins, which isn’t to say that those GMs ignore other areas of the game (except when it comes to the Phillies’ defense).

As you can see from the table, this year’s postseason scoring is down by over half a run per game relative to the regular season, but the home runs rate is up. We’ve explored some of the reasons from the pitching side, but mainly it comes down to better pitchers throwing a higher share of innings. There are no fifth starters here, managers are quicker to pull even their frontliners and turn the ball over to a parade of relievers throwing at maximum effort (and spin) for an inning, and rarely are there opportunities for the pitchers lowest in the pecking order. Here’s a comparison between regular season and postseason scoring levels since 2015, the cutoff I’ve been using for my annual looks at postseason pitching:

This is the seventh straight season in which postseason scoring has been lower than regular season scoring. This year’s 0.56 runs per game gap (4.28 regular season, 3.72 postseason) is the third-largest for the period; the largest was 0.8 runs in 2019 (4.83 regular season, 4.03 postseason), the smallest 0.22 runs just last year (4.53 vs. 4.31). With the consistency of that effect in mind, take a look at the comparison of home run rates:

Because postseason home run rates are sometimes higher than the regular season ones and sometimes not, that second graph looks a bit more unpredictable than the first one. Don’t be fooled, as at least during this time frame there’s a higher correlation between the two home run rates than between the two scoring rates. The year-to-year peaks and valleys for the homers line up better, perhaps because the changes are more closely linked with MLB’s ongoing fiddling with the composition of the baseball itself.

Regardless of the direction of those year-to-year fluctuations, what’s very consistent is that in the postseason, home runs account for a higher percentage of runs than in the regular season. Sheehan called that the Guillen Number back in the day, “because Guillen’s [2004-2009] White Sox teams have owed much more of their scoring to homers than to the one-run strategies to which their success was often attributed.” After a couple years of hiatus, BP returned to tracking the Guillen number this year, but I had to fill in the gaps and whip up the postseason version:

During the 2015-22 span, the percentage of runs via homers during the regular season sat in the 35.7% to 42.1% range for every year but ’19. The postseason percentages have been an average of 7.1 points higher, dipping below 42.1% only in 2015. For the past three seasons, about half of all postseason runs came via homers.

Looking at the aggregated hitting statistics, it’s not hard to see why that would be. Hits are fewer and further between in October:

So far this postseason, hitters have produced the lowest batting average, on-base percentage, and OPS for this eight-year period, and nearly their lowest slugging percentage as well. Only once in that span has the postseason batting average been above .235, which is two points lower than the lowest regular season mark in major league history, set in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. Only once in that span has the postseason OBP been above .310, a mark lower than every regular season OBP since 1968 as well. Likewise, only once in that span has the slugging percentage been above .400, where it’s been above .400 in every regular season since 1976.

The lack of hits puts a premium on short sequences. In a .227/.301/.386 offensive environment — that’s hitters’ aggregated postseason line from 2015-22 — it’s easier to get two runs via a bloop (or a walk) and a blast than by stringing together three or four events that might burn through outs while depriving fans of souvenir baseballs.

Again, this isn’t a new revelation, and it’s not to overlook the importance of other facets of the game, particularly pitching, or to deny that a lack of balls in play and a plethora of strikeouts may make for a less compelling game from an aesthetic standpoint. All things considered, it’s a great idea if a team can produce home runs and a flurry of hits in the parched environment of October — wonderful entertainment and championship-caliber baseball hand in hand — but for all of the paeans you’ll hear from the punditry about small ball and the little things it takes to manufacture runs, it remains a fundamental truth of postseason baseball that ball go far, team go far (Joe, your royalty check is in the mail).