Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the lack of pitch-clock violations in the postseason, an on-field Phillies smooch, the Phillies’ 2-0 lead on the Diamondbacks in the NLCS, a pivotal offseason for the Brewers, how MLB newsbreakers differ from NBA newsbreakers, the rising percentage of pitchers who’ve had Tommy John surgery, and how different baseball would be if regular-season series worked like postseason series, followed by (1:30:50) a radio-play-style Future Blast from 2074.

Audio intro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG clock violations
Link to MLBClockTracker on Twitter
Link to Phillies kiss tweet
Link to story on Yordan’s kisses
Link to FG post on Arizona’s bullpen
Link to Sheehan on lead changes
Link to drummer’s Phillies tweet
Link to “Jimmy Eat World” origin
Link to Neil Paine on the Phillies
Link to FG payrolls page
Link to story on Woodruff’s injury
Link to Arnold on Brewers decisions
Link to MLBTR on Woodruff
Link to Heyman on Counsell
Link to Brewers ballpark funding
Link to WaPo on Woj vs. Shams
Link to NY Mag on Shams
Link to The Arm
Link to Roegele’s TJ tweet
Link to Roegele’s TJ database
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to Alan Smale’s website
Link to Future Blast wiki
Link to ʻOumuamua wiki

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Max Scherzer hadn’t pitched in 36 days, but when a future Hall of Famer says he can go, it’s hard to say no. That’s the spot that the Rangers found themselves in, and up two games to none in the ALCS, they could afford a clunker if they had to. Unfortunately, that’s what they got. Scherzer surrendered five runs over four innings; Cristian Javier no-hit Texas into the fifth. Though Houston’s hurler didn’t remain unblemished, the Rangers couldn’t overcome their early deficit, and the Astros narrowed Texas’ series lead with an 8–5 win.

The first inning went innocently enough, though Scherzer allowed a pair of well-struck fly balls that hinted at the trouble to come. Ahead 0–2 on Yordan Alvarez to begin the second, the veteran went with a back-foot cutter that, well, hit Alvarez in the back foot. After punching out José Abreu, Scherzer walked Kyle Tucker on five pitches, then yielded a 104.8 mph frozen rope to Mauricio Dubón on a slider that hung up. Jeremy Peña popped out, and for a second, Scherzer seemed to be close to getting out of a bases-loaded jam. Instead, he spiked an 0–1 slider to no. 9 hitter Martín Maldonado, he of the 66 regular-season wRC+, to bring home Alvarez. On the very next pitch, Maldonado ripped a 101.1 mph single past third baseman Josh Jung, driving in two more:

Read the rest of this entry »

Kim Ng broke ground as both the majors’ first female general manager, and its first of East Asian descent, the culmination of a three-decade rise through the front offices of the White Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, and Major League Baseball. But after a three-season run during which she guided the Marlins to just their fourth postseason appearance ever, not to mention their first full-season finish above .500 since 2009, she and the team have parted ways. Reportedly, while the Marlins exercised their end of a mutual option for 2024, she declined her end, believing she had earned a stronger commitment from ownership.

After a decade and a half of interviews that put her on the cusp of history, Ng became the first female GM of a men’s team in any major league North American professional sport when the Marlins hired her in November 2020. She took over on the heels of the pandemic-shortened season, during which the Marlins went 31-29 and made the expanded playoffs, their first postseason appearance of any kind since 2003. The Marlins backslid to 67-95 in 2021 and 69-93 last year amid considerable organizational upheaval, but this year’s team broke through, winning 84 games (albeit with a -57 run differential) and drawing 1.16 million fans, the NL’s lowest total but the team’s highest since 2017, when it was still under the ownership of Jeffrey Loria. The Marlins finished third in the NL East, and through a tiebreaker claimed the fifth playoff seed. They dropped two games to the Phillies and were eliminated on October 4.

Generally such breakthroughs elicit extension offers that provide security instead of placing executives in lame-duck positions. Ng did receive an offer, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney, but it came with a catch. Owner Bruce Sherman is seeking to bring in a president of baseball operations, a senior executive to whom Ng would have reported. Understandably, moving down the pecking order wasn’t what Ng had in mind, as she had hopes of expanding and reshaping the front office under her own vision, cutting ties with holdovers in the scouting and player development department “with whom she did not reach a good working relationship,” according to the New York Post’s Joel Sherman. Read the rest of this entry »

In Game 3 of the Twins/Astros ALDS, the subject of Sonny Gray’s sweeper came up in the broadcast booth. That set the stage for Adam Wainwright to clear up some confusion that dates back a ways, and put forth an answer to the question that has been spinning around the league for a while: What exactly is a sweeper?

Here’s the clip:

Adam Wainwright explains the difference between a sweeper and a slider ? pic.twitter.com/vdtCh9EU6W

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 10, 2023

In just over a minute (and with deftly added pauses for the purposes of game calling), Wainwright covered a lot of ground, first pointing out the shape of the sweeper as compared to a traditional slider, then going on to scratch the surface of how the pitch is thrown and how that impacts its shape. At one point during his spiel, he chuckled at the camera, visibly concerned about how little time he had to explain something so complicated. So with the benefit of a much more flexible word count than he was afforded in the booth, let’s break down Wainwright’s breakdown, beat-by-beat, and see if we can illustrate and expand on what he was talking about by taking a look at some of 2023’s sweepingest pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Josh Jung and Geraldo Perdomo have been great, too. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Zack Wheeler is important because he’s a great player, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

I’ve already covered the losing managers of the Wild Card round and the other division series eliminations. Today, it’s Brian Snitker’s turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Every play in a scoreless postseason game is pivotal. The Phillies, despite being the better team on paper with a 1–0 series lead in the bag, could ill afford to give away cheap outs on either side of the ball. Six days ago, Brandon Marsh listed the lessons the team had learned from blowing a lead in Georgia two nights previous: “Put them out of it. Finish the job. Don’t let them climb back in the game.”

Trea Turner committed two errors in that game, the second of which led directly to Atlanta’s first run of the playoffs. It snapped the best offensive team of the regular season back to life and arguably started a stunning comeback that could’ve knocked the Phillies off their axis.

Aaron Nola was excellent in his first two postseason starts of 2023, but he’s been prone to big innings both in this regular season and last year’s playoffs. The last thing he needed was one of the fastest players in the league to reach base and cause trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Both the Phillies and Diamondbacks entered this Championship Series on a playoff tear, combining for just one loss during their four series wins. But in the battle for the NL pennant, one team’s good fortune would have to end, and so far, Arizona has been unable to deal with the buzzsaw that is Philadelphia’s roster. A day after a close loss headlined by the three home runs Zac Gallen surrendered, the Phillies hit another trio of dingers off the Diamondbacks’ no. 2 starter, Merrill Kelly, and it only continued downhill from there.

While playoff games have been increasingly defined by the reliever parades enabled by an abundance of off days, this game was a battle of two workhorse starters. Aaron Nola and Kelly both rank in the top 10 in baseball in innings over the past two years, and are consistently available to go deep into games. A lot happened in the final three innings on Tuesday, a stretch that exposed the stark difference in the quality of these two bullpens, but we can focus much of our attention on the rotation members dueling from each team.

Nola’s performance this year was uncharacteristically poor by his standards. He’s always possessed some of the best command in baseball, and he throws a hellacious two-planed knuckle curve as his strikeout pitch. But despite that, he had a 101 ERA- and 90 FIP- this season. His strikeout and walk rates were still great, but his home run rate ballooned, as he couldn’t keep his pitches away from the middle of the plate. His pitches in the “heart” zone, as measured by Statcast, were too predictable, costing him seven runs compared to average after dominating that area previously. It meant that his results had a hard ceiling despite having great stuff and avoiding free baserunners. But his six scoreless innings in Game 2 brought his ERA this postseason down to a tiny 0.96; more impressively, he hasn’t allowed a single home run in his three playoff starts. Let’s see how his arsenal shut down Arizona’s bats. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the LCS edition of my weekly chat. Yesterday we had a couple of games that got blown open early but tightened up late, and we now have the Rangers heading back to Arlington up 2-0 and the Phillies up 1-0 on the Diamondbacks after Schwaber, Harper, and Castellanos hit about 1300 feet worth of early homers.

2:02	Jay Jaffe: I previewed the NLCS , in case you missed it https://blogs.fangraphs.com/nlcs-preview-arizona-diamondbacks-vs-phila…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Next up for me is a piece on Kim Ng’s departure from Miami and hopefully a Corbin Carroll thing for later this week.

2:02	Jay Jaffe: anyway, on with the show

2:06

Jay Jaffe: I’ll have more tomorrow but I think there were a couple of related things going on. Ng wanted to clean house a bit as far as staff to find people she was more in alignment with and bring some new voices into the organization — something that worked out well when she got to hire a new manager (Schumaker) — but owner Bruce Sherman apparently wasn’t amenable to that. He’s planning on bringing in a president of baseball operations, so she essentially would have been demoted to second-in-command, which doesn’t play well when you’ve just guided a team to its first full season above .500 in 14 years and their first full-season playoff berth in 20.

Read the rest of this entry »

Clarke Schmidt had mixed results in his first season as a big league starter. The 27-year-old New York Yankees right-hander took the mound 33 times (including once as a reliever) and won nine of 18 decisions while logging a 4.64 ERA and a 4.42 FIP. Working primarily in five- and six-inning stints — 21 of his outings were between 5.0 and 6.2 innings — he allowed 169 hits and fanned 149 batters over 159 frames.

A new pitch played prominently in what is now a well-balanced repertoire. Schmidt added a cutter this year, and while it wasn’t his best offering results-wise — that honor goes to his curveball — it was his most used. All told, his usage breakdown was 28.1% cutters, 27.4% slider/sweepers, 23.9% sinkers, 19.1% curveballs, and 1.5% changeups.

Thirteen months ago, I sat down with Schmidt to discuss his sweeping slider, a pitch that was referred to in the subsequently published piece as a “baby whirly.” This past September, I circled back to hear about his cutter — and I had something else in mind as well. With the definition of “sweeper” increasingly becoming a matter of debate, I wanted to know how he currently labels the most horizontal of his offerings.

———

David Laurila: What is the story behind your cutter?

Clarke Schmidt: “The reason they wanted me to add the cutter was lefties. The idea was that I could throw a fastball to lefties and be able to induce either A) weak contact or B) a swing-and-miss. That was the real reason, and then once I started throwing it we realized that my arm action was built even more for a cutter than they thought. The metrics on my cutter are really good. Analytically it became one of my best pitches, which is why they were like, ‘Why don’t we up the usage of this?’ Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Evan Carter and Corbin Carroll have been great too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Bryce Harper is important because he’s a great player, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. I’ve already covered the losing managers of the Wild Card round and the ALDS. Dave Roberts is up next.
Read the rest of this entry »