Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest home run predictions (by Carlos Estévez and Lawrence Butler), top closers blowing leads, the compelling, competitive postseason, highlights of recent games, broadcasters invoking momentum, replay controversies, and Padres-Dodgers bad blood, plus follow-ups on green screens (or the lack thereof) on baseball broadcasts, fun-fact qualifiers, and the Reds and the Selig Rule, and closing banter about the Brewers and Willy Adames.

Audio intro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG playoff coverage
Link to Estévez prediction piece
Link to his previous prediction
Link to Estévez prediction pod 1
Link to Estévez prediction pod 2
Link to Estévez prediction pod 3
Link to Butler interview clip
Link to story on Butler and Harris
Link to player predictions wiki
Link to Carpenter homer
Link to hardest-hit balls vs. Clase
Link to Clase 3-run HR fact
Link to Carpenter leaderboard 1
Link to Carpenter leaderboard 2
Link to Carpenter career platoon splits
Link to Rosen on Carpenter vs. Clase
Link to Clase pitch-type splits
Link to Sam on closer flops
Link to FG reliever projections
Link to SP cruising study 1
Link to SP cruising study 2
Link to momentum study 1
Link to momentum study 2
Link to momentum study 3
Link to momentum wiki
Link to Sam on the 2014 Royals
Link to Paine on 1-1 ties
Link to ZiPS odds
Link to Ben Clemens on weekend games
Link to Nate Silver post
Link to replay reviews breakdown
Link to MLB quotes about replay
Link to Dodgers-Padres Athletic recap
Link to Dodgers-Padres breakdown video
Link to Roberts quote
Link to Machado video 1
Link to Machado video 2
Link to Rosenthal on Machado
Link to dugout sides
Link to Simpsons clip
Link to Lux quote
Link to green screen photo
Link to Ortiz photo 1
Link to Ortiz photo 2
Link to virtual replacement ads info 1
Link to virtual replacement ads info 2
Link to virtual replacement ads info 3
Link to Alonso fun fact
Link to Carpenter fun fact
Link to Francona hiring article
Link to Heyman tweet
Link to Brewers postseason streak
Link to Gandalf book quote
Link to Gandalf movie quote
Link to triple crown question 1
Link to triple crown question 2
Link to triple crown question 3

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Mets fans have their narrative: Sean Manaea was remarkable in Game 3 of the NLDS, keeping the Phillies in check over seven-plus innings and leading his club to a resounding 7-2 victory. Phillies fans have their narrative, too: The NL East champs played uncompetitive baseball all evening, pushing them to the brink of elimination. The former narrative gives the Mets all the agency (they won because they played well!), while second gives the Phillies all the blame (they lost because they played so poorly!), but that doesn’t mean they both can’t be true. The Mets were firing on all cylinders in Game 3, and the Phillies didn’t do much to stop them.

Entering play on Tuesday, all four Division Series were tied up 1-1. That effectively turned each series into a three-game set – and a three-game set in which the lower seeds held home-field advantage. It’s no secret the Phillies love playing at Citizens Bank Park; their 54-27 (.667) record at home this season was the best in baseball, while their 41-40 (.506) record on the road was tied for 13th. However, the Phillies still had an ace up their sleeve as they packed their bags and left for Queens. They only had to win one game at Citi Field and they could come back home to another Zack Wheeler start at the Bank. That’s a big reason why they came into tonight’s game with a 61% chance to advance to the NLCS, as well as the highest World Series odds among the eight remaining teams. Read the rest of this entry »

The Kansas City Royals have a great starting rotation, a bullpen that’s come together nicely over the past few weeks, and a lot of team speed. The offense? Eh, it’s not great. Let’s not underestimate the impact of Bobby Witt Jr., who was the best normal-sized player in the American League this year, and should count as two All-Stars. They’ve got a couple big dudes to drive in Witt, but Salvador Perez is 34 going on 50, and Vinnie Pasquantino is working with a barely healed right thumb. That’s no small issue — the thumb is what separates us from the apes.

I was going to break out the old cliché about bringing a knife to a gunfight, but there have been times when manager Matt Quatraro was probably looking around and thinking, “You know what, I would settle for some cutlery right about now.”

Nevertheless, the Royals cooked the Orioles in the Wild Card round, and split the first leg of the ALDS at Yankee Stadium, coming very close to winning both games. That’s because, in his search for a barely survivable amount of offense, Quatraro is pushing all the right buttons. 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 »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat in my new Tuesday noon ET time slot. I’m still trying to wake up after a late night in the Bronx, where things quickly spiraled out of control for Carlos Rodón and the Yankees https://blogs.fangraphs.com/that-escalated-quickly-royals-rally-agains…

12:04

Jay Jaffe: I was saddened to hear today about the death of Luis Tiant. Quite a memorable and colorful character, and a pitcher who I think probably belongs in the Hall of Fame. Wrote a bit about Tiant in light of S-JAWS a couple of years ago https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-the-best-of-the-unens…. I’m going to try to figure out when I can fit in a tribute amid my playoff coverage.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Which reminds me, thank you to everyone who chimed in with a kind word about my Pete Rose piece https://blogs.fangraphs.com/for-pete-rose-1941-2024-the-hustle-has-fin…. I got a very nice note yesterday from Mark Monroe, the director of the HBO documentary for which I was interviewed, Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose. Check it out if you want a no-holds-barred look at a very complicated figure.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Because stuff like this inevitably happens? Even the best bullpens get knocked around once in awhile, because relief pitching is a high-variance job. Most of these guys are two-pitch pitchers, and if one of those pitches isn’t working well, it’s trouble. It’s also worth remembering that particularly with division rivals, hitters can get multiple looks at a reliever and that can shift the advantage in their favor.

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Carlos Rodón was dealing… until he wasn’t. Fired up for his first postseason start as a Yankee, with a sellout crowd of 48,034 cheering him on, the 31-year-old lefty avoided the early pitfalls that had characterized his uneven season by turning in two very strong innings, including a 12-pitch, three-strikeout first. But after the Royals showed they could produce hard contact against him in the third, they chased him from the game with a four-run fourth, starting with a solo shot by his old nemesis, Salvador Perez, and then a trio of hits. While Rodón’s opposite number, Cole Ragans, only lasted four innings himself, the Royals bullpen stymied the Yankees, who collected just two hits across a four-inning stretch before showing signs of life again in the ninth. Their rally died out, and the Royals pulled off a 4-2 win in Monday night’s Game 2, sending the best-of-five series back to Kansas City with the two teams even at one win apiece.

After making just 14 starts in an injury-plagued 2023 season — his first under a six-year, $162 million deal, Rodón took the ball for a full complement of 32 starts, a career first — and threw a staff-high 175 innings, albeit with a 3.95 ERA and 4.39 FIP. While he ranked sixth in the AL in strikeout rate (26.5%) and ninth in K-BB% (18.8%), he was one of the most gopher-prone starters in the league, serving up 1.59 homers per nine, third highest among qualifiers. What particularly tripped up Rodón was a pronounced tendency to struggle early. He posted a 5.63 ERA and 4.92 FIP in the first and second innings while allowing 14 homers in those 64 frames, compared to a 3.00 ERA and 4.09 FIP thereafter.

On Monday he looked untouchable in the first. He caught Maikel Garcia looking at a 95.7-mph four-seamer in the lower third, whiffed Bobby Witt Jr. chasing the high cheese, and got Vinnie Pasquantino to fan chasing an outside slider in the dirt. His only blemish in the second inning was a two-out single by Michael Massey, which he negated by punching out Tommy Pham chasing a low-and-away changeup. Through two innings, he’d thrown 20 pitches, 18 for strikes, with four whiffs. 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 »

Hang it in the Louvre:

Oh, and this one too:

The playoffs were absolutely wild this weekend. Out of the six games played Saturday and Sunday, two were all-time classics. First, the Yankees and Royals traded blows before Alex Verdugo produced a game-winning single after a controversial stolen base call. Then the Phillies and Mets traded home runs and blown leads right up until the last play of the game, Nick Castellanos’s walk-off hit.

If you wanted to, you could read our game stories for these games, or any number of other fine pieces about them across the internet. You could watch highlights or condensed recaps. But this is FanGraphs, so I thought I’d cover another angle: where these games fit in the history of wild playoff games.

We have win probability charts going back to 2002, which means we have data on total win probability changes going back to that year as well. If you take the absolute value of these and sum them up, you can see exactly how much each team’s fortunes changed throughout the contest. The more total win probability changes, the wilder things are. For example, the least exciting game by this measure occurred on October 9, 2019. The Cardinals beat the Braves 13-1 in the NLDS, and they opened things up by scoring 10 in the first inning. No drama, and thus very few changes in win probability. A 2023 contest between the Diamondbacks and Dodgers (11-2 Arizona, 9-0 after two innings) is the runner up.
Read the rest of this entry »

I started writing this article just before the playoffs began, and I framed it to myself as a trailer for an early-2000s romantic comedy. I thought Matthew Boyd and the Cleveland Guardians fit the rom-com formula surprisingly well. After his second breakup with his ex (the Tigers), Boyd was hurt (recovering from Tommy John surgery), unemployed (a free agent), and short on suitors (unsigned well into the season). When he had his meet cute (signed a contract) with the Guardians, they were successful (best record in the AL) but something was missing (starting pitching). Sparks flew instantly. Boyd pitched to a 2.72 ERA in eight starts. Cleveland won six of those eight games.

Now, the Guardians are just a baseball team, standing in front of a Boyd, asking him to start in the ALDS. Replace Boyd with Kate Hudson and make him a journalist instead of a baseball player, and you’ve got your movie. About a Boyd. To All the Boyds I’ve Loved Before. You get it.

Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for the rest of you), my colleague Kiri Oler came out with an excellent piece not so long ago that just so happened to use a Kate Hudson rom-com as a framing device. I was delighted that two different writers thought to write about Kate Hudson on a website that usually couldn’t have any less to do with Kate Hudson, let alone the fact that we both thought to do it in the same week. At the same time, I was disappointed I’d spent so much time coming up with “Boyd” puns for nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Let’s just get this out of the way up top: Jazz Chisholm Jr. should have been called out at second base.

The replay review of his seventh-inning stolen base showed that his foot had not yet touched the bag when Royals second baseman Michael Massey applied the tag. Chisholm then scored the go-ahead run on Alex Verdugo’s single to left field, and the Yankees won a somewhat sloppy, back-and-forth Game 1 of the American League Division Series, 6-5, on Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.

“They just said there was nothing clear and convincing to overturn it,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said Sunday morning, after he asked MLB why the call on the field was not reversed. “If he had been called out, that call would have stood too.” Read the rest of this entry »