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Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Sam’s thoughts on Clayton Kershaw, Joe Kelly, and Dave Roberts, Tyler Glasnow’s pitch-tipping, Gerrit Cole’s strikeout streak, and the future of the Rays, the Astros-Yankees and Nationals-Cardinals championship series matchups, and whether it ever makes sense to predict a postseason sweep or a series lasting the maximum number of games.

Audio intro: Avey Tare, "Tipped in Hugs"
Audio outro: The Bees, "Sweet Like a Champion"

Link to Ben on Dave Roberts
Link to story on Glasnow
Link to Glasnow video breakdown
Link to Ben on predicting postseason series lengths
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Gerrit Cole simply dominated the Rays across his two starts in the ALDS. Across almost 16 innings, he allowed just one run and nine baserunners while striking out nearly half of the batters he faced. That lone run he allowed was a solo home run off the bat of Eric Sogard. Of all the players on the Rays’ playoff roster, no one would have guessed it would be Sogard to hit a dinger off one of the best pitchers in all of baseball. But was it really that unlikely?

For his part, Sogard put together a career year this season. He posted career highs in ISO, wRC+, and WAR while launching 13 home runs, two more than his career total across eight previous seasons. Long viewed as a light-hitting utility infielder, Sogard showed he was capable of hitting for power in a way that he had never been able to before. And yet, he only averaged an 84.7 mph exit velocity this year, and his hard hit rate sat in the third percentile in the majors. But by adding an extra 2.5 degrees to his average launch angle — and with some help from the dragless ball — 13 of those hard-ish hit fly balls snuck over the fence.

Cole did struggle a bit with the long ball this season, allowing 29 home runs and a career-high 16.9% home run per fly ball rate. That’s 10 more home runs than he allowed last year and just two fewer than the career high he allowed in his final season in Pittsburgh in 2017. But Cole’s home run troubles and Sogard’s newfound power only tell part of the story in broad generalizations. So let’s dig into the specific event to see if we can find anything more interesting. For starts, here’s the video of Sogard’s home run in case you missed it last night.

Sogard gets around on a 95-mph fastball on the inside corner and hits it solidly enough to reach four rows back in right field. The pitch itself was rather peculiar. Cole’s average fastball velocity this season was 97.1 mph. In the game last night, he averaged 97.3 mph. This fastball was the second slowest fastball he threw all night. When Cole’s fastball velocity has dipped that low, opposing batters have had a much easier time handling his heater. Here’s a table showing how batters have fared against his fastball at different velocities: Read the rest of this entry »

“OUTCOME, n. A particular type of disappointment… judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal nonsense; the wisdom of an act is to be judged by the light that the doer had when he performed it.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Coming up this early in this baseball autopsy series, the Padres find themselves in the midst of a number of disappointing teams in search of a direction. The Padres do have a direction, they just haven’t gone far enough along the road that they should be stopping for coffee and bathroom breaks. Of the teams that have been covered so far in this series, the Padres are the first one that I’m legitimately optimistic about when it comes to their 2020 record.

The Setup

People have a tendency to not use the word “mediocre” correctly. Many use it as a synonym for awful, which it is not. Mediocre is an eternal C- student, something of continually below-average quality without being a grand failure. The post-Gwynn Padres may be the best example of a mediocre franchise.

With losing records in 11 of the past 12 seasons, the Padres never really descended into the full “farce” category, never losing 100 games or failing to make the 70-win line in consecutive seasons. The Padres as a franchise never really elicit an LOL reaction, let alone a full-bore ROFLMAO; they’re the team that you’d occasionally remember exists when your favorite team is on a road trip. Even the uniforms reflected this state of affairs. The current blue-and-white uniforms aren’t cringe material like the White Sox experiment with collars and shorts, and they aren’t obscenely odd like the Turn Ahead the Clock jerseys that assumed everyone in the future would be extremely near-sighted. They’re just bland and forgettable, like if you were using the create-a-team feature in a baseball video game and forgot to change the jersey from DefaultTeam1. Read the rest of this entry »

After two very different Division Series, the two strongest teams in the AL by win totals and run differentials will meet in the ALCS. The Yankees (103-59) won just two games more than the Twins during the regular season, and were outhomered by one, yet they continued their post-millennial postseason dominance of Minnesota, beating them in a Division Series for the fifth time in the past 17 seasons, outscoring them by a combined total of 23-7 and producing the round’s only sweep. The Astros (107-55) looked as though they might sweep of the Rays as well after Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole produced two of the postseason’s most stifling performances to date, yet they needed the full five games to advance thanks to some strong pitching by the Rays, who kept most of the Astros’ big bats at bay.

This series is a real heavyweight bout. It’s the fifth time that two 100-win teams have matched up in a postseason series during the Wild Card era, all of which have taken place within the past three years: the 2017 World Series between the Astros (101-61) and Dodgers (104-58), the 2018 Division Series between the Red Sox (108-54) and Yankees (100-62), the subsequent ALCS matchup between those Red Sox and the Astros (103-59), and the aforementioned Yankees-Twins ALDS this year. In terms of combined wins by the two teams, this pairing is second only to last year’s Red Sox-Astros ALCS. Additionally, of course, this is a rematch of the 2017 ALCS, which was won by the Astros in a seven-game series during which home teams went undefeated. Houston has home-field advantage this time around as well, though they’re the one team from this pair who has yet to win a postseason game on the road. The series opens in Houston on Saturday, October 12, at 8 pm. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals rotation is headed by Max Scherzer with fellow aces Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin falling neatly in line. Yet, when the Nationals take on the Cardinals tonight, Aníbal Sánchez will get the start. A hard-fought Division Series against the Dodgers saw Scherzer and Strasburg start the fourth and fifth games of the series with Corbin pitching in relief on Wednesday. With those three unavailable, Washington turns to their fourth starter in Sánchez.

Sánchez, who put up a six-win season with the Tigers in 2013, developed some home run issues from 2015 through 2017 before having a bounceback season in 2018 that continued into this year, as he’s been a solid, slightly above-average starter. He’s lost about three mph off his fastball since his career year, but he throws a mix of pitches to keep hitters off balance. He has three offerings he uses most of the time in a 90-mph four-seam fastball, a slow change, and a cutter. He also mixes in a splitter, and he got two strikeouts using that pitch against the Dodgers (both against Russell Martin). He throws the fastball outside to both lefties and righties. While Sánchez throws the change more often against lefties, he does use it a decent amount to come inside against righties, and that pitch is the 35-year-old’s only real swing-and-miss offering. Against the Dodgers, Sánchez got five strikeouts on the change, including this one against Cody Bellinger.

The four-seam fastball usage bodes well for the Cardinals, in theory, as they have feasted on the pitch all season long. However, the Cardinals have put up terrible numbers against both the cutter and the change. Potentially providing more trouble, the Cardinals won’t be able to try and get ahead in the count and expect the fastball, as Sánchez’s usage of the pitch actually goes down when he’s behind in the count. The righty threw his four-seam fastball in a 0-0 count 42% of the time this season, so if the Cardinals are going to look for that fastball, it needs to happen on the first pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

Minute Maid Park roared when Roberto Osuna‘s slider eluded Ji-Man Choi’s bat for the final out of Thursday’s Game 5, but then again, it had already been roaring for some time. The crowd of people within its walls hollered and yelped as their fire-breathing dragon of an ace took the mound to start the game, and they shouted some more as he struck out the first two hitters of the night. When the home team came to bat and scratched across four runs in the first inning, they could barely contain themselves. They bellowed and barked and caterwauled, more quietly in the middle but even louder at the end, watching the best pitcher on the planet today render yet another opposing lineup into silence.

The Houston Astros defeated the Tampa Bay Rays by a score of 6-1 on Thursday in an ALDS Game 5 that never really felt that close. Houston’s offense took a commanding lead early, and Gerrit Cole was in command throughout, tossing eight innings of one-run, two-hit, two-walk baseball while striking out 10. With the performance, he managed a combined 15.2 innings pitched in two victories over the Rays in this series, allowing just one run on six hits and three walks while striking out 25 — the second-most over a pitcher’s first two postseason games in any season ever.

The victory advances the Astros into the ALCS for a third straight year, where they will face the New York Yankees with Game 1 scheduled for Saturday at 8:08 p.m. The Yankees haven’t played since Monday, when they clinched a three-game sweep over the Minnesota Twins. The two teams virtually matched each other step for step during the seven games they faced each other during the regular season, with the Astros going 4-3 and outscoring New York just 39-37. Read the rest of this entry »

I still remember where I was the first time Playoff Kershaw became a thing. It was 2013, and the Dodgers were a juggernaut. They’d steamrolled through the second half of the regular season behind an exuberant Yasiel Puig and a dominant Clayton Kershaw, and they manhandled the Braves in the NLDS behind two triumphant starts from their ace; 13 innings, a solitary earned run, and 18 strikeouts.

He pitched well against the Cardinals in his first start of the NLCS, a 1-0 loss, which brings us to my memory. Game 6, an elimination game for Los Angeles, wasn’t going to be easy for me to watch. My girlfriend and I were in a remote town in Argentinian Patagonia, and the satellite signal came in intermittently between cloudbursts. On a grainy, 18-inch TV, we sat down to watch the broadcast in Spanish.

Kershaw imploded. Michael Wacha dominated. The announcers screamed with joy at every run, exulted in rich and varied pronunciations of “Kershaw” and “Wacha,” and generally had a great time. I drank it in right along with them, marveling at the good fortune that led the Cardinals past such a formidable opponent with a rookie starter on the mound. I couldn’t have known it was the start of something bigger. Read the rest of this entry »