SEATTLE — On a per-game basis during the regular season, the Mariners and Tigers both scored and allowed roughly the same number of runs — 4.70 and 4.28, respectively. Through the first four games of the best-of-five ALDS, each team eked out a one-run win and each team triumphed in something of a laugher. Both teams won one game at home and one game on the road, and both teams relied extensively on their bullpens. Heading into Game 5 on Friday night in Seattle, it was clear one team was going to need to do something to distinguish itself. These teams entered the night locked in a dead heat, having played matching hands for much of the series and needing a new strategy, something different to get an edge and break the stalemate, and even then, it required 15 innings and four hours and 58 minutes to do that. When it was all over, the Mariners had outlasted the Tigers, 3-2, on a walk-off single by Jorge Polanco to advance to the American League Championship Series for the first time in 24 years.

“I don’t even know where to begin to try to recap all the heroic efforts that went into today,” manager Dan Wilson said. “And 15 innings? I’ve got to say, I don’t know how the fans kept their energy going. It was unbelievably loud, even in the 15th inning. And this is a special place. T-Mobile Park is a special place, and they showed us that tonight. And just an incredible ballgame from top to bottom.”

Both starting pitchers were taking the mound for a second time in the series, and both brought a slightly different approach to Game 5 than what they put on tape in their prior starts. In Game 1, Seattle starter George Kirby threw his slider 31% of the time; it was the first pitch he threw to eight of the 22 batters he faced. In Game 5, Kirby went to his slider 50% of the time and threw it as the first pitch to 10 of the 18 batters he faced. After the game, he confirmed this was a conscious shift in strategy to show Detroit’s lineup something different from what it’d seen from him six days prior. “All those guys from top to bottom are probably looking for a heater to start,” Kirby said, “and just starting off with a slider, curveball, whatever it may be, just — if I kept them off balance a little bit, I was able to attack the zone a little bit more with my fastball.” By mixing in more sliders early in the count, he was able to maintain the effectiveness of his four-seamer despite the recent exposure. Though the slider-heavy approach meant Kirby racked up fewer strikeouts than usual, he finished his outing allowing just three hits and one earned run over five innings with six punchouts. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley announce their playoff livestream plans and then break down Game 4 of the Phillies-Dodgers NLDS, including their musings on Orion Kerkering’s game-ending error and the events that preceded it, whether baseball would be better or worse without its tragic on-field figures, the Phillies’ future, and the intimidating Dodgers. Then, after a few thoughts on the Brewers and Cubs, they banter about baseball’s culture of pitch-tipping paranoia (53:29), the effects of high-tech pitching machines (1:09:20), the upcoming MLB free agency of NPB slugger Munetaka Murakami (1:17:00), and potentially encouraging comments about MLB’s path to a unified package of broadcast rights (1:20:58), plus a postscript message from Meg (1:30:05) about the Mariners’ ALDS Game 5 victory.

Audio intro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to sign up for Patreon
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Link to Stark on the Phillies’ future
Link to Petriello’s post
Link to new meme format
Link to bunting etymology
Link to FG Cubs-Brewers gamer
Link to article on pitch-tipping
Link to Ben on the banging scheme
Link to Wilson’s chess quote
Link to The Bandwagon on Trajekt
Link to 2024 Trajekt Stat Blast
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Link to Ben on pitching machines
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Link to road wRC+ by year
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Link to Ben on Murakami/Sasaki
Link to Normandin article
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Even the best pitchers in baseball lose a game once in a while. Just ask Tarik Skubal. I’m sure you’ve read about it a hundred times by now, but the Mariners have won all three of their games this year where Skubal was the opposing starter. Seattle was the only team to hand him multiple losses during the regular season, and the Tigers dropped Game 2 of the ALDS — technically a no-decision for Skubal — less than a week ago. Now, thanks to his team’s roaring come-from-behind victory in Game 4, Skubal is lined up to start tonight’s decisive Game 5, giving him an opportunity to finally beat the Mariners this year.

I’ll give a warning upfront: This article is going to lean pretty heavily on batter-pitcher matchup stats; we’ll be examining some extremely small samples. But I think it’s an interesting investigation into the strategy that unfolds between familiar foes during a short postseason series.

What I really wanted to know is whether the Mariners had a specific approach that made them so successful against Skubal this year. As I mentioned, Skubal faced the Mariners twice during the regular season. On April 2, in Seattle, he allowed three runs in 5.2 innings; he gave up six hits and three walks while striking out eight. On July 11, he faced them again, this time in Detroit, and allowed four runs in five innings; he gave up just four hits and two walks while striking out five. His Game 2 start this past Sunday was his best yet: He surrendered two runs on five hits and one walk in seven innings while notching nine strikeouts. The two home runs off the bat of Jorge Polanco were his undoing. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of different types of players get sent to the Arizona Fall League by their parent clubs: prospects who have lost time due to injury, org arms there to soak up enough innings for the league to function, guys eligible for the Rule 5 Draft whose teams aren’t yet sold on putting them on the 40-man roster, and, quite often, the most talented and exciting players in minor league baseball. It’s a rich and robust tapestry.

Now that the league’s action has commenced, one use of the AFL is to provide a sort of decontextualized look at some of the players whose strong performance in 2025 was already cause for some re-evaluation. Here’s one player from each AFL roster who arrived with some helium, prompting us to ask if they’ve changed their scouting report, or are just progressively improving into the player we expected.

Glendale Desert Dogs
Sam Antonacci, 2B, White Sox
2025 FV: Honorable Mention

Not only did the White Sox trade for Chase Meidroth months after giving Antonacci a slightly over-slot bonus in the fifth round of the 2024 draft, their Double-A Birmingham affiliate won the Southern League while slotting Antonacci in as the third straight feisty little bat-to-ball maven at the top of their lineup behind Rikuu Nishida and William Bergolla. At six feet, he’s a bit taller, but similar to Meidroth, below-average thump and a dearth of the athleticism necessary to drive a shortstop projection cooled early scouting reads for Antonacci, and he was an honorable mention for us on the White Sox list in April. Despite only playing his junior season there after two years of Division II ball, Antonacci is so Coastal Carolina-pilled that 35 hit by pitches form a substantial part of the .433 OBP he held over his first full pro season. (That he has yet to be plunked in his first three AFL games has to be, one would imagine, a source of deep personal disappointment.) Read the rest of this entry »

You may think you’ve already heard enough about Aaron Judge’s heroics during this postseason, especially considering that he wasn’t able to keep his team from getting knocked out barely a week into October. Heroes usually do a more thorough job when saving the day. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about Judge’s 2025 playoff excellence. But I’d argue that you haven’t heard enough, because there’s a bit of context I’d like you to consider. That context? The entirety of postseason history.

Over the course of the American League Divisional Series against the Blue Jays, Judge batted .600. If you factor in his .354 batting average against the Red Sox in the Wild Card round, he batted an even .500 over 31 plate appearances this postseason. Now let’s head over to our handy-dandy postseason leaderboard. If you set a minimum of 30 PAs, you’ll find that Judge just ran the third-highest batting average ever over a single postseason; his .581 on-base percentage is the second highest. His 253 wRC+ is the 14th highest in postseason history (just behind the 255 mark that teammate Giancarlo Stanton put up in 2020). By that standard, Judge just produced one of the greatest postseason performances ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the rampant overuse of the phrase “must-win game,” denying late timeouts, the Blue Jays’ victory over the Yankees, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., a Yankees postmortem, Aaron Judge’s partial postseason redemption, the athletic (and managerial) highlights and lowlights of the other ALDS and the two NLDSes, the swan song of October Clayton Kershaw, postseason sacrifice bunting, Bryce Harper’s thoughts on childbirth, and more.

Audio intro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Passan’s Phillies tweet
Link to Posnanski on comebacks from 0-2
Link to Vlad’s Yankees grudge
Link to Vlad and Papi
Link to Papi on Schlittler
Link to Rosenthal on Judge
Link to Sheehan on Judge
Link to Rosenthal on the Yankees
Link to The Ringer on Fox’s MLB panel
Link to “clean your clock” etymology
Link to Stott bunt explanation
Link to Harper quote
Link to Raleigh shirt story
Link to infield-fly call
Link to Stark fun fact
Link to The West Wing scene

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Jeez, I thought the Cubs were dead. These guys got torched both games in Milwaukee, then nearly contrived to blow Game 3 after jumping out to a 4-1 first-inning lead.

Game 4 started much the same way for Chicago, with a three-run first-inning homer by Ian Happ, only this time they didn’t let up. Matthew Boyd slung breaking balls around Milwaukee bats for 4 2/3 scoreless innings, and rather than rest on their first-inning output, as they did in Game 3, the Cubs put up a late-inning picket fence to stretch the final score to a serene 6-0. A decisive Game 5 in Milwaukee awaits. Read the rest of this entry »

Man, am I tired of writing about the Dodgers and Phillies. I mean some of that narrowly – this is my second recap of these two financial juggernauts facing off in the past 24 hours, which means I’ve spent more time pondering these two teams than sleeping lately. I mostly mean it broadly, though. We get it, the Dodgers and Phillies are the best two teams in the NL every year. I hear you, they each have a slugging lefty DH who hit 50 homers and has a rabid following. It’s true, they have a former MVP lefty first baseman who departed his longtime NL East team and got a big sack of money for it. Oh, how original, a slight-of-stature righty shortstop who is a dynamic offensive player anyway. A slugging right-handed right fielder who honestly shouldn’t be playing defense? Yup. Endless stacks of pitchers? Sure thing, buddy, nothing but the best for these two.

Maybe it’s my lack of attachment to either team that makes me so tired of seeing them in October. Philadelphia’s “Oh, we’re a bunch of plucky underdogs” act? Exhausting. The Phillies have a $300 million payroll. Dodgers Baseball And Capital Appreciation Corporation employees executing carefully workshopped “dances” to simulate “fun” after base hits? No one’s buying it. But I don’t think it’s just the neutrals. My guess is that even fans of these clubs are sick of it at this point. Everything that annoys you about your opponent in this series is exactly what annoys the rest of us about your team. They even have obnoxious fanbases – not every fan, obviously, but come on, even Dodgers and Phillies partisans will agree with me on this one. Can’t we have someone else?

We can’t, of course. These teams have all the stars! Of course they’re always in the playoffs! And even more confusingly for me, you’re presumably here because you find this series interesting. If you just wanted to know the score, well, they publish those right away. So bear with me. The teams might be overexposed and easy to root against, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a good recap. Just follow Emperor Palpatine’s advice and let the hate flow through you. Read the rest of this entry »

Shutting down the Dodgers offense has been one of the toughest assignments in baseball this October. A series of great opposing pitchers, including Cy Young candidates aplenty, surrendered 27 runs in their first four playoff games. Sure, the Los Angeles pitching has been great too, but you can score on the Dodgers. The difficulty has been with stopping their unending procession of base-clearing prowess.

The Phillies seemed to be well suited to stopping the Dodgers, but that was before Los Angeles won the first two games in Philadelphia. Even worse, the Dodgers sent ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound, so limiting the offense figured to be even more important than normal. That’s too much work for one starter, so Rob Thomson turned to Aaron Nola and Ranger Suárez looking for a tandem performance. As it turned out, that decision was inspired. Along with two Schwarbombs, the Nola-Suárez piggyback propelled the Phillies to an 8-2 win at Dodger Stadium and postponed elimination for at least one more night.

Nola has had a rough year. He missed three months with injury, and looked much diminished when he did pitch en route to posting the worst single-season ERA (6.01) and FIP (4.58) marks of his long, decorated career. He wasn’t in this game for a long time, but he was in it for a good time. He came out absolutely jacked, with his velocity up two to three ticks and a snapping knuckle-curveball that hearkened back to his form of a few years ago. It didn’t click right away – Shohei Ohtani scorched a line drive for an out and then Mookie Betts tripled – but Nola buckled down, blew away Teoscar Hernández with a beautiful curve, and escaped the inning unscathed. He kept it going through a perfect second, perhaps as far as he was ever expected to go. Read the rest of this entry »