The key decision point in Saturday night’s Mariners-Tigers game came in the fifth inning, when manager Dan Wilson left righty George Kirby in the game to face a dangerous lefty, a third time through, with a runner on base. Kerry Carpenter smacked a 400-foot homer, erasing a Seattle lead, and the Tigers won 3-2 in 11 innings. So on Sunday, when righty Luis Castillo found himself in a similar pickle, Wilson found himself in a bind of his own.
The situation: a Gleyber Torres single put runners on first and third with two outs in the fifth inning. The next batter? None other than Carpenter. For the second straight day, the Mariners held a 1-0 lead, and this time, further runs didn’t feel likely, not with Tarik Skubal on the mound. Castillo had bobbed and weaved his way through the Tigers lineup two straight times, but he’d thrown 85 pitches to do so, scattering four walks and that Torres hit through his 4 2/3 innings.
This was no easy decision. Each choice had several points in its favor, but several downsides as well. Why pull Castillo? The situation greatly disfavored him. He’s far better against righties than lefties, and his platoon splits have only increased since he moved to Seattle and started weaning the changeup out of his arsenal. Even worse, Carpenter was up for a third time and had already seen 10 pitches from Castillo, including everything in his arsenal. Carpenter himself has huge platoon splits; in his career, he’s faced righties six times as often as lefties, with a 138 wRC+ against righties and a 69 wRC+ against lefties. Gabe Speier, Seattle’s middle-inning lefty of choice, is outstanding against lefties, and generally just outstanding overall. Finally, Castillo didn’t have his best stuff, and certainly didn’t have his best command. A change would meaningfully improve the matchup for Seattle, in the biggest spot of the game. Read the rest of this entry »
The pitching matchup favored the Yankees. With all due respect to one of baseball’s best young arms, Toronto’s Trey Yesavage came into the contest having thrown just 14 big league innings. Conversely, New York starter Max Fried is a three-time All-Star who finished the season 19-5 with a 2.86 ERA. While Yesavage has a bright future — he’s currently the Blue Jays’ top prospect — his mound opponent seemed a better bet to perform under the pressure-packed lights of the postseason.
That didn’t happen. Yesavage, who began the year in Low-A and didn’t make his major league debut until September 15, not only kept the Yankees off the scoreboard, but he did so in spectacular fashion. As for Fried — ditto his teammates who followed him on the bump — it was a veritable horror show. He got rocked. When all was said and done, Toronto had bombarded the Bronx Bombers to the tune of a 13-7 rout that wasn’t as close as the final score suggested. The win gave the Blue Jays a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five Division Series.
That Canada’s team launched four home runs and took a 12-0 lead before the Yankees recorded their first hit — a sixth-inning single after Yesavage had left to a huge ovation — isn’t exactly a footnote to what transpired at Rogers Centre. It was an impressive onslaught. Even so, what the 22-year-old right-hander with the power arsenal did was the story of the day. Read the rest of this entry »
SEATTLE — “We didn’t steal one. We earned it.” Those were the first words spoken by Tigers manager A.J. Hinch following Game 1 of the ALDS at T-Mobile Park on Saturday night. Hinch took umbrage with a reporter’s characterization of a 3-2 victory that spanned 11 innings in a road ballpark as “stealing one.” Managers should bring that type of bravado to the press conference. Especially Hinch, who is tasked with imbuing confidence in a squad that has been dogged by tales of its epic collapse for over a month.
But with all due respect to Hinch, to describe any one-run, extra-inning game as one where either team definitively earned the win, or on the flip side deserved to lose, places all the emphasis on the final result and glosses over exactly how that result came to be. The Tigers got the win, and now they enjoy a 1-0 series lead with Tarik Skubal, the reigning (and presumptive) AL Cy Young award winner, taking the mound for them in Game 2. They get to bask in the glow of that advantage, and they absolutely should. But if Hinch gets to quibble with verbiage, so do I. Read the rest of this entry »
He doesn’t garner much press — at least not outside of Tigers territory — but Will Vest has developed into one of baseball’s better relievers. The 30-year-old right-hander has appeared in 181 games for Detroit over the past three seasons and logged a 2.93 ERA and a 2.71 ERA over 187-and-a-third innings. Moreover, he is currently the team’s closer. Vest’s 2025 ledger includes 23 saves to go with a 3.01 ERA and a 2.71 FIP, and he recorded the final out in both of the club’s Wild Card wins over Cleveland. If the Tigers go on to beat the Mariners in the ALDS, Vest will likely have played a key role.
He could easily be pitching for Seattle. As related by Dan Hubbs in a piece that ran here at FanGraphs two weeks ago, the Mariners took Vest in December 2020’s Rule-5 draft, only to return him to the Tigers the following July. Hubbs had departed as Detroit’s director of pitching development by the time Vest was reacquired, but he was, and remains to this day, bullish on the righty’s raw ability.
Vest was one of three pitchers (Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal were the others) whose development process the now-Athletics’ bullpen coach looked back on in the September 23 article. Spin rates that were “off the charts” was an attribute Hubbs saw in the then-under-the-radar prospect, as were “good movement profiles on everything he threw.” For the young hurler, success at baseball’s highest level “was just a matter of him getting comfortable competing in the strike zone.“
What are Vest’s memories of working with Hubbs, and in which ways has he continued to develop in the years that have followed? Read the rest of this entry »
PHILADELPHIA – It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from one game of a playoff series, but after Game 1 of the NLDS, you can take this lesson to the bank: Nobody’s perfect.
Cristopher Sánchez was on the verge of completing six imperious innings, until the last three batters he faced — the last pitch he threw, really — sent the Phillies into a spiral. Teoscar Hernández committed a borderline-unforgivable defensive gaffe, then atoned with interest by the end of the night with a game-winning three-run homer.
Shohei Ohtani, making history by leading off a playoff game as a starting pitcher, looked not just like a two-way player but like two different people. Ohtani has seldom looked so hapless at the plate, striking out in each of his first four plate appearances. He made a slightly less glorious brand of history, becoming the sixth player in the pitch tracking era to strike out looking three times in a playoff game.
But on the other hand. Ohtani came out the winning pitcher: nine strikeouts in six innings, with just four baserunners allowed. Hernández’s seventh-inning homer off Matt Strahm made the difference in a 5-3 Dodger win. Read the rest of this entry »
At this time last year, the Blue Jays faced some serious uncertainty. They’d just finished last in the AL East, and they had only one more season guaranteed with both Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette on their roster. The future became even murkier during the winter, when the Yankees and Red Sox were both beefing up, the Orioles were still expected to be good, and the Rays were, well, the Rays. Both Guerrero and Bichette became the subject of trade rumors; really, there were questions about whether or not Toronto would just blow it all up.
Oh, how things have changed. In early April, the Jays extended Vladito through the end of the next decade, and then they caught fire. And now, one year after coming in last, they finished tied with the Yankees for the best record in the American League and took the division because they won the season series between the two teams. For that reason, Toronto hosted Game 1 of the Division Series against the New York on Saturday, and after the Jays bludgeoned the Yankees, 10-1, maybe it’s the boys from the Bronx who should be feeling a bit of self doubt.
As a franchise, the Yankees have played 441 postseason games; this loss ranks as one of their worst playoff humiliations ever:
The Brewers and the Cubs played nine innings of baseball on Saturday, but Game 1 of the National League Divisional Series was decided before the end of the first. Every series starts off with its share of questions. Did the Brewers have enough pitching to withstand injuries to Brandon Woodruff and Shelby Miller? Could Kyle Tucker and Pete Crow-Armstrong locate the MVP form they’d showed earlier this season? How would a Brewers offense that loves to work the count fare against a strike-throwing Cubs pitching staff? Would the Brewers be rusty after a five-game layoff? Would the Cubs regret starting Matthew Boyd on short rest after he threw just 58 pitches against the Padres on Tuesday? In Game 1, those last two questions were all that mattered.
The Brewers were not rusty, and Boyd may well have been. The Cubs jumped out to an early lead, but in the bottom of the first, the Brewers exploded on Boyd like they’d spent the past five days packing themselves into a cannon. During the regular season, the Brewers scored only 9% of their runs in the first inning, the third-lowest rate in baseball. Maybe they were saving it all up for the playoffs. Milwaukee raced to a 6-1 lead in the first and extended it to 9-1 in the second. “I’m proud they came out ready,” said manager Pat Murphy during the game. “The guys came out ready to swing, and when they’re ready to swing, a lot of good things can happen. They’re a great bunch.”
By virtue of their first-round bye, the Brewers lined up ace Freddy Peralta to pitch Game 1. After an early hiccup, Peralta looked every bit the guy who led the NL with 17 wins and notched three of them against the Cubs. He missed well outside with a 95-mph fastball on the first pitch of the game, then came back with a belt-high heater over the center of the plate, which Chicago leadoff hitter Michael Busch fouled off. Peralta repeated the pattern: four-seamer well outside, belt-high four-seamer over the middle. Busch was ready for the second one. He turned on it and sent it 389 feet over the right field fence. Four pitches in, the Cubs had a 1-0 lead. Peralta recovered quickly, retiring the next three batters in order. He’d allow just one more base hit over the next four innings.
In the bottom of the second, Jackson Chourio squared to bunt on the first pitch from Boyd, then took it for a ball inside. Looking back, it’s tempting to wonder what would have happened had Boyd put the pitch in the strike zone. Maybe if Chourio would have actually bunted the ball, and maybe the whole game would have gone differently. But it was tight and Chourio pulled the bat back, then ripped the fourth pitch he saw down the third base line for a double. Brice Turang knocked Chourio in with a double of his own, lining the first pitch he saw on a hop off the right field fence. The Brewers had tied the game at one after five pitches. William Contreras ripped the next pitch just past a diving Ian Happ for a double into left field, scoring Turang. With doubles on three consecutive pitches, the Brewers grabbed a 2-1 lead. They were far from done.
Chicago pitching coach Tommy Hottovy walked out to settle down Boyd, who induced a grounder to short from Christian Yelich, then deepened his trouble by walking Andrew Vaughn. Much earlier than the Cubs would have liked, Michael Soroka started warming up in the bullpen.
Boyd broke Sal Frelick’s bat, inducing a weak grounder to second base. Nico Hoerner, who may well end up winning his second Gold Glove this winter, charged the ball and then inexplicably biffed an easy hop. The ball kicked past him, allowing Contreras to score. The Brewers still had runners on first and second with one out, now with a 3-1 lead. Boyd struck out Caleb Durbin with a four-seamer above the zone, then got ahead of Blake Perkins, 1-2. He was one strike from ending the inning, but Perkins worked an incredible 12-pitch at-bat, fouling off pitch after pitch, then ripping a line drive right back up the middle – the thing that both he and the Brewers love the most in the world – scoring Vaughn and moving Frelick to third. The Brewers had a 4-1 lead and Boyd’s day was over after 30 pitches and two-thirds of an inning.
Soroka came into the game with a simple mandate: stop the bleeding and keep the game close. Instead, he walked ninth hitter Joey Ortiz on four pitches, loading the bases and bringing Chourio back to the plate. This might be a good time to note that Chourio ran a 307 wRC+ with two homers in last year’s Wild Card Series, his only previous playoff games. He pushed that career postseason mark even higher, rocking a single through the left side of the infield to drive in two more runs. The Brewers led 6-1. Mercifully, Soroka got Turang to chase a high fastball for strike three.
The Brewers hit for 26 minutes in the first inning. They saw 45 pitches from two pitchers. They notched five hits, walked twice, and reached once via error. They put seven balls in play with a 72% hard-hit rate. Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out that it was the first time they’d scored six runs in the first inning all season. The incomparable Sarah Langs noted that teams to score at least six runs in an inning had gone 113-1 in postseason history. With that last single off the bat of Chourio, Soroka’s job changed. It was no longer to keep the game within reach. It was to eat as many innings as possible in order to keep the Cubs from annihilating their bullpen in addition to falling behind in the best-of-five series.
Peralta allowed a single to Crow-Armstrong, but he needed just 12 pitches to retire the Cubs in the top of the second and give the Brewers the chance to get right back to hitting. After leading off the first with three straight doubles, Milwaukee led off the second with three straight singles.
Contreras singled to left, Yelich singled to right, and Vaughn singled to center. The bases were loaded and Aaron Civale got warm in the Cubs bullpen. Frelick lined out to left field on a ball that was too shallow for Contreras to tag up on, then Durbin dropped a duck snort into shallow center field, knocking in two. Seventeen Brewers had come to the plate. Thirteen had reached safely. Eight had scored. Perkins grounded out to first base, pushing the runners to second and third with two outs. Ortiz walked on four pitches, loading the bases again, and Counsell made the slow walk out to the mound. Soroka lasted just one third of an inning longer than Boyd. The job of eating innings fell to Civale, whom the Brewers traded to the White Sox for Vaughn back in June and whom the Cubs claimed off waivers at the end of August.
Chourio greeted Civale with another grounder right down the third base line, this one for an infield single to push the score to 9-1. However, it came with a price. Chourio missed nearly the entire month of August with a right hamstring strain, and he aggravated the injury as he hustled to beat the throw from Matt Shaw. Visibly distraught, he spoke to a trainer, then left the field, and walked back to the clubhouse. The Brewers announced that he would be evaluated further after the game. Turang struck out to end the inning, and the TBS broadcast announced that Brewers were the first team in playoff history with nine runs and 10 hits in the first two innings.
The Cubs and Brewers played seven more innings of more baseball. Peralta pitched brilliantly, though he surrendered another solo homer to Happ in the sixth inning. He left one out shy of a quality start, and the Milwaukee faithful rewarded him with a standing ovation. He gave up three earned runs over 5 2/3 innings, striking out nine, walking three, and allowing four hits. Civale filled his role excellently too, scattering three hits over 4 1/3 innings and allowing Counsell to ask the bullpen for just two more innings. Hoerner added another solo homer off Jared Koenig in the eighth inning before Nick Mears closed things out in the ninth.
The questions going into Game 2 will revolve around Chourio’s health and Chicago’s ability to bounce back from such a thorough drubbing. The Brewers possess a capable fill-in in Isaac Collins, who ran a 122 wRC+ as a rookie this season, but Chourio is an awfully hard player to replace. His three hits pushed his career wRC+ in the playoffs to 361, and if the hamstring injury is anywhere near as serious as it looked, it’s hard to imagine him returning in time to play against the Cubs. With the 9-3 victory, the Brewers drew the season series with the Cubs even at 7-7. The good news for the Cubs is that they’ll have a day off before Game 3, allowing their bullpen to get some rest. Although Boyd threw just 30 pitches, he seems unlikely to go on short rest in Game 4.
Favorable conditions for a dramatic and explosive era of the Cubs-Brewers I-94 rivalry have been percolating for a while. And now they come to a head as the two clubs meet each other in the playoffs for the first time ever, even though it’s been 27 years since the Brewers changed leagues. Fan friction invariably occurs when two sports-loving cities are proximate to one another (you can drive from Milwaukee to Chicago in roughly 90 minutes along the southwest shore of Lake Michigan), but tensions grew here when Cubs manager Craig Counsell decided to jump ship from Milwaukee to Chicago after the 2023 season.
Spurned and abandoned by Counsell (and David Stearns) even though the team has been consistently (and seemingly sustainably) competitive, Milwaukee has carried on as a scrappy throwback squad built on contact, speed, and defense. Despite dealing with an April blight of pitcher injuries so bad that it gave us a week of needless torpedo bat discourse, the Brewers finished with the best record in the majors, won the NL Central by five games, and made the postseason for the seventh time in the last eight years, though they have just one NLCS appearance in that mix. The Cubs are fresh off a down-to-the-wire Wild Card Series win in a decisive Game 3 against the Padres in which their deep lineup tallied 13 hits, many off of excellent (if taxed) San Diego relievers. Let’s examine the component parts of each team in greater detail to remind ourselves how each team was assembled, and how they arrived at this part of the postseason. Read the rest of this entry »
The playoffs are off to a thrilling start, with three of the four Wild Card Series lasting the full three games and seven of the 11 games being decided by no more than three runs. We saw excellent defense in Chicago, an offensive outburst in Los Angeles, and a handful of great starting pitching performances.
The best part is we’re just getting started. Today, all four Division Series begin, which means we have another marathon day of baseball ahead of us. First up, we’ve got a pair of divisional foes squaring off, with the Brewers and Cubs set for 2:08 p.m. ET in Milwaukee, followed by the Blue Jays and Yankees at 4:08 p.m. ET in Toronto. In the third game of the day, Shohei Ohtani makes his postseason pitching debut against the Phillies; before he takes the mound, though, he’ll step into the Citizens Bank Park left-handed batter’s box as the Dodgers’ leadoff man at 6:38 p.m. ET. And then to cap it off, the Mariners host the Tigers at 8:38 p.m. ET. As always, we’ll be covering all the action here at FanGraphs.
Before we get to this week’s mailbag, I have one quick programming note to remind everyone of. We’ll still be doing our weekly mailbag during the postseason, but we might move around the specific day it runs depending on the playoff schedule. Our plan is to do one before every postseason round, as we are today. Also, I’d like to remind all of you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
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How would you assess the current state of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry? Are these two teams going to be on a collision course for the next several years like they were in the early 2000s? Or is that more of a TV network pipe dream? — Connor G.
“I think it is intense in October. During the regular season, there’s others that are more intense. The one in the West Coast is stupid, you know, the Padres and the Dodgers. That’s intense from the get-go,” Cora said. “It’s not that we’re not intense during the regular season, but it has toned down throughout the years.”
He’s right. Anyone who has watched the way the Dodgers and Padres have gone at it lately knows that it’s the closest thing baseball has to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of the early 2000s. When it comes to the on-field emotions between the two teams, the Yankees have had more beef with the Rays and Blue Jays, and then obviously with the Astros, than they have with the Red Sox in recent years. Some of that certainly has to do with the on-and-off success that Boston has had over the last decade, because the Yankees and Red Sox have only been in competition with one another for either the AL East crown or the AL pennant a few times.
But a larger part of why the rivalry has cooled off some is rooted in how the two organizations view themselves. Jay Jaffe and I were talking about this during batting practice this week while we were covering the series. Basically, because the Red Sox have won four World Series in the last 20 years (three more than the Yankees in that span), Boston no longer brings an inferiority complex to the park when it plays New York. As much as we here at FanGraphs are all about witchcraft and superstition, we can all agree that there was no literal Curse of the Bambino. However, there is a real emotional and psychological toll that comes from watching a competitor of yours win it all year after year after year while you get so close but can’t quite do it. It’s embarrassing and degrading, and over time, you develop a sense of defiance. You fight back instead of letting yourself get picked on. This attitude is one of the core symptoms of Little Brother Syndrome. The Padres arguably have it now vis-à-vis the Dodgers, and at times, the Rays and Blue Jays bring it to their matchups with the Yankees. But the Red Sox seem to have outgrown it.
That doesn’t mean the fans don’t get more passionate about Yankees-Red Sox games than they do for other matchups, because they absolutely do. With the exception of last year’s World Series, the atmosphere at the Stadium this week was different than it was for the other playoff series I’ve covered there over the last handful of years. The people in the stands understood the stakes, and it didn’t take much effort for them to conjure up their old emotions from when the rivalry was at its peak.
Which brings us to your question about whether this year’s series is going to be the first of many meaningful matchups between the two teams, and if so, whether that would that be enough to reignite the rivalry. I think these two teams are going to be competing with each other for the rest of the decade. With the exception of 2023, when everything went wrong and they missed the playoffs, the Yankees have demonstrated an organizational competence that makes me confident that they’ll be a perennial postseason team, while the Red Sox are just now opening their window of contention. Aaron Boone acknowledged as much late Thursday night on the Yankee Stadium infield, after his team popped champagne and turned their clubhouse into a lazy river of booze. “They’re a great team that’s getting better and better,” he said. “They’re going to be a scary club next year with where they’re going and what they’ve built the last couple of years.”
That level of competition could go a long away toward bringing the rivalry back. I think that could especially be the case if Massachusetts natives Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice become core players of these Yankees. Rice grew up a Yankees fan despite living in Red Sox territory, while Schlittler was a Sox fan and comes from a family of Sox fans. Boston fans could end of being more ruthless if they feel like they’ve been betrayed by two of their own. That’s what Schlittler experienced before his Game 3 start, and he said it fueled his historic performance.
And yet, even as I forecast a brighter future for this rivalry, I don’t think it’ll ever go back to what it was in the early 2000s. Those matchups featured so many massive personalities — Roger Clemens and Pedro Martínez, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield and David Ortiz, David Wells and Curt Schilling — that when you combined them with the tribalism of the fanbases, the high stakes of the competition, and some Little Brother Syndrome defiance, it created a molotov cocktail of emotions that could explode at any moment. We will never again see anything like Pedro snatching a charging Don Zimmer by the head and flinging him to the ground, and that’s a good thing. I don’t ever want something like that to happen again.
Fortunately, there is a healthy midpoint between the narcoleptic just-another-game mentality and elder abuse, and after what we saw in the Yankees-Red Sox AL Wild Card Series this week and based on what we expect from these two teams in the near future, the rivalry appears to be on the rise.
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Hey team! First time, long time. Love the mailbag. Question as a long-suffering Reds fan.
Why are some teams — like the 2010s Cardinals, or the current vintages of the Brewers and Guardians — consistently able to harness baseball devil magic, while other teams with equal — like my Reds — or better resources never seem to be able to?
Is this some cosmic cycle that’s currently benefitting the people of Cleveland like it did St. Louis 10 years ago, and that will eventually get around to me? Or is there something intrinsically special about these teams? Or am I just being punished for being born in the wrong Midwestern town? — Ari
Michael Baumann: So I want to push back a little bit on the idea that these Midwestern teams are unnaturally successful, because they don’t actually do much once they’re in the playoffs.
The Guardians have made it to the ALCS three times in the 21st Century. In 2007 and 2016, they had the best starting pitcher in the AL both years, multiple elite relievers, and dynamic, switch-hitting superstar position players. Nothing magical there; they were just legitimately good teams. Last year, they snagged a bye by default, thanks to a weak division and an indifferent Astros team. They then beat a team from the same division in the ALDS and the first actual good team they ran into caved their faces in.
The Brewers have won a round in only one of their past six playoff appearances. The Cardinals, the most magical team of the bunch, haven’t won a round since 2019. Their unlikely run to the championship in 2006 and penchant for winning dramatically in 2011 gave them an air of the supernatural, but they also got swept in the World Series as a 105-win team in 2004 and no-showed the NLCS in 2019.
As for how these teams keep getting to the playoffs so frequently, well, what your examples have in common is a weak division and a penchant for doing pitcher development well and on the cheap.
Beyond that, I think there’s a tendency to ascribe a quality of clutchness to teams that don’t have impressive lineups but perform well in the postseason. Given how much teams can shorten their rotations and manage their high-leverage bullpens, great pitchers can give you more bang for your buck in the playoffs than in the regular season. There are limits to this phenomenon (for example: I know how bad the Brewers have been in the playoffs because I keep picking them every year and they keep making me look like an idiot), but it’s worked for Cleveland, and Kansas City, and most notably in the recent past for the Even Year B.S. Giants.
It helps, of course, if you have a future Hall of Famer in the lineup. In short, if Cardinals Devil Magic is real (or was, because it sure isn’t happening now), the Great Satan’s name is Albert Pujols.
But the real answer to your question is here: About 50,000 years ago, prehistoric humans began to understand that while their environment followed certain natural rules and patterns, individual events could be unpredictable, as if they were being influenced by invisible spirits. Thus began shamanism, an attempt to communicate with and influence these spirits, and from there all forms of religion and spirituality.
Existence is probabilistic. How unlikely is it that atoms bumped together to form amino acids and proteins, and that they came together in just the right combination to create life? And even given that unfathomable fluke, how could single-celled organisms evolve into complex humans who can throw curveballs? I admit it seems pretty far-fetched that all of this could happen by chance. But working in a sandbox as big as the universe, on a time frame as long as tens of billions of years, unlikely things are bound to happen somewhere, sooner or later.
Sports, being as it is a religion, involves observing our natural world and its chaotic and capricious path, and trying to retrofit some explanation to make it all make sense. The idea that everything is meaningless (“a chasing after the wind,” to quote the holy book of a non-baseball-related faith) leaves us empty. So we stare into the abyss and try to find God. Or worse, the St. Louis Cardinals.
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Hi mailbag!
Masataka Yoshida‘s clutch hit got me wondering. What’s the biggest historical example of a player whose contract was widely seen as underwater, or who was seen as a burden by fans, suddenly becoming a playoff hero? Was Barry Zito’s 2012 big enough? Basically, the biggest zero-to-hero redemption arc. Not so much the reverse (a.k.a. the Patrick Corbin), which is probably more common.
Cheers!
Brian
Dan Szymborski: The playoffs are a time of chaos — and small sample sizes — so there’s plenty of opportunity for goats to be come heroes and vice versa. I think my favorite example of this in recent years is that of José Abreu. He was pretty terrible his first season in Houston (the second year didn’t go any better!) and was largely seen as a drag on their postseason roster. Then he got into the playoffs, and while the Astros ended up losing the 2023 ALCS to the Rangers, Abreu hit four homers in 11 games, good for a .945 OPS that October. His career after that, which lasted all of six weeks, only had two more homers left in it. I’m not sure the Giancarlo Stanton contract is viewed as negatively, but he’s clearly fallen short of overall expectations in New York. Still, he’s had some really big postseasons with the Yankees.
On the pitching side, you brought up Zito, and he’s the pitcher whose name comes instantly to mind for me. His contract is widely seen as one of the most disappointing pacts of the last decade-plus, but he did net the Giants two huge starts: a 7 2/3 inning shutout against the Cardinals in the 2012 NLCS, and a one-run start a week later in the World Series. It’s still recognized as one of the worst contracts the Giants ever signed, but Zito did earn a bit of redemption given that the Giants won the championship.
That’s who most stands out to me now, but who knows, we might be adding Javier Báez to this list soon!
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Dearest FanGraphs Crew,
The news that the Angels’ leading candidate for manager is Albert Pujols got me thinking: What if a major league team wanted to sign a quality 5-WAR free agent — let’s call him Tyle Kucker — and Kucker said, “I’ll only sign with your team if I get to be player-manager for the entire term of my contract?”
How much less (more??) would a team offer Kucker under those conditions? Maybe a one-year deal with a giant team option to make sure he’s not a disaster as a manager? Maybe no effect at all because we can’t quantify managers’ contributions to winning?
Thanks and keep up the good work. — sds
Ben Clemens: Before we try to walk through the theoretical implications, let’s just start out with a downer: No one wants this. What player would want this? What team would want this? From the player perspective, playing baseball is already a full-time job, and being a manager requires a ton of work too. Figuring out how to run a bullpen takes work. Managing player personalities and egos isn’t trivial. Working with coaches and analysts to sort out gameplans is important! You have to figure out player rotations, keep everyone happy, and spend a ton of time talking to the media to make sure that you are communicating team decisions well. These days, managers surely also have to spend a ton of time talking to the front office making sure they’re happy. The two and a half hours of game time where you get pride of place in the dugout and make pitching changes and pinch-hitting decisions is the payoff, but players are pretty busy during the game already, and I can’t imagine a lot of guys think to themselves, “You know what? I’m just not busy enough during games.”
Fine, though. Let’s put all of that aside and say that a star hits free agency, considers all of the stuff I just said, and decides that they want to be a player-manager anyway. If I were a team, I’d try as hard as I possibly could to dissuade them from making this decision. Sure, we can’t quantify the total impact that a manager has on his team’s chances of winning, but no one thinks that there’s no value to it. The Rays are always penny-pinching, but they don’t hire someone from a temp agency to manage the team. That’s because the job is difficult and doing it well has value.
Basically, I’d offer meaningfully less on this deal if the player insisted that they were contractually required to be the manager the whole time and that no one else could fulfill any managerial duties. I’d offer more if we came to an agreement that they would just do the “glamorous” parts – meetings on the mound, postgame press conferences, standing on the top step of the dugout and looking worried – while letting me backfill the behind-the-scenes parts of the job with other staff. If this star really just wants the glory of managing, well, first I’d tell them that there’s a lot less glory in managing than there is in playing. But second, I guess I’d let them. If all they wanted to do was make in-game decisions, I wouldn’t even “charge” them much for it, assuming we talked through their pinch-hitting philosophy beforehand and it wasn’t “backup catchers only.” But my deal stops there. If a player insisted upon doing all of a manager’s tasks and also wouldn’t allow anyone else to do those jobs, I’d offer them meaningfully less money and basically tell them to go elsewhere.
Being a manager is a difficult job. In addition, “we can’t totally measure manager value” is really different from “manager value doesn’t exist.” Teams would absolutely balk at a player wanting to do all of the stuff a manager does, because there aren’t that many hours in the day, and failing to do those things really would be a problem. On the other hand, players almost certainly wouldn’t ask for this, because they see their own managers at work — they know what comes with the job.
Ben Lindbergh brings on Michael Baumann, who immediately makes Ben regret it by subjecting him to a lyrical ode to Effectively Wild inspired by the Taylor Swift song “Wood.” Then they play “College Baseball Player or Make and Model of Car?” before recapping the three decisive Game 3s of the wild card round (with an emphasis on the absurdity of the Guardians’ immediate elimination after their historic AL Central comeback, a bad call on Xander Bogaerts, the heroics of Cam Schlittler and Ryan McMahon, and converting from Red Sox fandom to Yankees fandom) and ranking the four division series matchups. Then (1:15:44) Ben talks to Tigers TV broadcaster Jason Benetti about calling the team’s 2024 comeback and 2025 collapse, how to process their reprieve from elimination after a historic blown lead, players to pay attention to in the ALDS, and naturally, John Brebbia.
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