Finally, a postseason game that went into extra innings. Everyone was waiting for it to happen. After all, that sort of thing hadn’t occurred since… a week ago. In retrospect, that “marathon” Guardians-Rays game was pretty zippy. Just 15 innings? Only 394 pitches? On Saturday night, the Astros and Mariners cordially invited the Guardians and Rays to hold their beer. Then another. Then perhaps six more.

How about an 18-inning game, tied for the longest in postseason history? How about 498 pitches? How about a record 44 strikeouts? The teams combined for 18 hits across those 18 frames. Christian Vázquez came in as a pinch hitter in the seventh and batted five times. Luis Garcia came on in relief and very nearly notched a quality start. The Mariners didn’t allow their first walk until the 16th (though they did hit four batters). Read the rest of this entry »

It had been leading up to this all day. After the Phillies routed the heavily favored Braves, after the Astros clinched their ALCS ticket with a go-ahead home run by Jeremy Peña in the 18th inning, and after Oscar Gonzalez walked up to the SpongeBob SquarePants theme and walked off the Yankees, of course it was the Padres who authored the closing spectacle. Down 3–0 in the seventh of Game 4, they rallied for five runs and are headed to the NLCS, their first in 24 years.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, have been saddled with one of their most humiliating losses in recent memory. A juggernaut in the regular season, none of their 111-win momentum carried over into this elimination game, or the entire series for that matter. For those who enjoy it, Los Angeles’ rapid implosion is a refreshing splash of schadenfreude; the 116-win 2001 Mariners at least made it past the Division Series, but the 2022 Dodgers will live in infamy for having won one measly playoff game.

Their collapse is made all the more heartbreaking by the auspicious start that preceded it. Watching the Dodgers had been an excruciating experience this series, punctuated by brief moments of hope to be deflated soon after. They were 0-for-their-last-20 with runners in scoring position, if that makes sense. But finally, Los Angeles broke through in the third inning. Mookie Betts drew a lead-off walk, Trea Turner doubled, and so did Freddie Freeman to drive in two runs:

For the first time in what felt like an interminable while, the top of the Dodgers’ order resembled the well-oiled, run-producing machine that flattened its opponents. Before it could kick into overdrive, however, Joe Musgrove settled down, getting the two additional outs needed to shut the door.

Speaking of Musgrove, he featured his four-seam fastball 44% of the time, which, considering his regular-season rate of 24%, was uncharacteristic. But it also made perfect sense. The one misconception about the Dodgers, likely popularized by this graphic, is that they are a superb fastball-hitting team. Rather, they are a superb fastball-taking team; their chase-averse tendencies are responsible for a collectively high run value. When attempting to make contact, though, the Dodgers have been objectively terrible. The optimal strategy against them, then, is to throw fastballs for strikes. That’s basically what Musgrove did, even though he sometimes strayed too far to his glove side:

As a result, Musgrove largely cruised through the game. The only other moment of danger he encountered came in the sixth, when fatigue seemed to set in, resulting in a walk followed by a single. But as the internet loves to proclaim, Musgrove got that dog in him. He struck out Chris Taylor looking for the second out, then Gavin Lux swinging on a perfectly-located high fastball for the third. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerrit Cole is your prototypical right-handed power pitcher. With an upper 90s fastball and upper 80s slider, he is consistently among a few at the top of the strikeout leaderboard; unsurprisingly, he led all of baseball in strikeouts this season with 257. Given his stature and that season mark, you’d expect he would also be somewhere near the top of the WAR leaderboard. Well, not quite, largely in part because Cole also led all of baseball in home runs allowed with 33, the most in his career.

As a primary fastball pitcher who lives in the middle to upper part of the zone, Cole is bound to give up home runs. His approach is and, as long as he still has velocity, will be: here’s my fastball, try to hit it. In early August, I wrote about how his mechanics can sometimes fluctuate from inning to inning through the course of a game, and how in turn the shape and locations of his pitches can get distorted. I didn’t get too in the weeds of how his fastball shape declined this year, but Michael Ajeto of Baseball Prospectus dove deep into Cole’s fastball shape just a few weeks ago. In his piece, he explained the various contributing factors: a higher release point due to a slight change in his lead leg block/plant; decreased spin despite career-high velocity; and a near-career-low vertical approach angle (VAA) of -4.6 degrees. Ajeto also pointed out that it might be a good idea for Cole to up the usage of his slider, the pitch with the highest RV/100 in his arsenal.

Cole, however, went in a slightly different direction at the end of the year:

Focus on the last two points on that graph, when Cole’s curveball usage shot up to its highest usage rate of the 2022 season. Similarly, in his ALDS Game 1 start against the Guardians, he threw the pitch 26% of the time, yielding eight whiffs on 11 swings; that whiff rate (73%) is his highest in a single game this year for either of his breaking balls when throwing the pitch at least 10% of the time. It’s something Guardians hitters did not plan for, either, as it hasn’t been in Cole’s bag for the last couple of years.

In ALDS Game 1 especially, the key for Cole was command and consistency in placing the ball at the bottom or under the zone. Add that to the two regular-season starts when he upped the curve usage, and you can see how impressive his control has been:

Aside from two hits, including a home run on a pitch right down the middle, Cole has buried the pitch under the zone time and time again — pink, pink, and more pink! The success has come as a semi-surprise; as Ajeto noted, Cole could have simply just thrown his slider more. But the curveball has brought a level of surprise to at-bats that Cole hasn’t had given his aggressive approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years before being hired to manage the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Joe Maddon interviewed for the job in Boston. The winter-of-2003 vetting by the then Red Sox decision-makers — a subject I broached with Maddon in a 2007 interview — didn’t bear fruit… but what if it had? Earlier this week, I asked the proud son of Hazleton, Pennsylvania what might have happened had he started his big-league managerial career in Boston.

“I don’t think it would have turned out as well,” responded Maddon, who spent nine years in Tampa before going on to manage the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Angels. “I wasn’t ready for that; I wasn’t ready for that market. Theo [Epstein] and Jed [Hoyer] made a great decision. Tito was the right guy.”

History bears that out. Four years removed from managing the Philadelphia Phillies for the same number of seasons, Terry Francona led the Red Sox to their first World Series title since 1918. While Maddon went on to win a World Series of his own, with the Cubs in 2016 — the team’s first since 1908 — hiring a first-year manager as Grady Little’s replacement wouldn’t have been in Boston’s best interests. Nor in Maddon’s.

“I needed more time to really develop what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it,” explained Maddon, whose managerial resume includes nine 90-plus-win seasons. “I really did need more of an expansion team than a tradition-based team at that point. I could experiment. I could try different things that weren’t very popular, or that nobody had thought about. I needed that wider berth, and the support that I got from Andrew [Friedman] at that particular time. So, thank God for unanswered prayers. I wanted the Red Sox job, but it was so much better for me to start out with the Devil Rays.” Read the rest of this entry »

Home runs trump singles and doubles, and for that reason it looked like the New York Yankees were going to beat the Cleveland Guardians in ALDS Game 3. Buoyed by a pair of two-run blasts, with a solo shot thrown in for good measure, the team that led baseball in long balls (254) in the regular season was poised to push the contact-oriented club that finished with exactly half as many to the brink of elimination.

It didn’t happen. Instead, yet another chapter in late-inning heroics was written by a team looking for its first World Series title since 1948, as Cleveland rallied for three runs in the ninth inning to walk off New York, 6–5 and take a 2–1 series lead in the best-of-five ALDS. The Guardians can clinch their first pennant series trip since 2016 in Game 4 on Sunday.

The Guardians took an early lead against Luis Severino. Steven Kwan led off the bottom of the first inning with a double, and with one out and runners on the corners, Josh Naylor hit a ball that shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa couldn’t handle. Ruled a single, it plated Kwan and set Cleveland up for what might have been a big inning. It wasn’t to be: The Guardians ended up stranding two runners in scoring position when the slumping Andrés Giménez — just seven hits in his last 42 at-bats with 16 strikeouts going into the game — fanned on a full-count pitch.

Another chance for a crooked number came in Cleveland’s next turn, when Kwan singled home Gabriel Arias, who had doubled to open the bottom of the second, with one out, but Severino induced back-to-back flyouts to leave a pair of runners stranded once again. Through two innings, the Guardians had six hits, but their lead was only 2–0. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you eat the bear. Sometimes, the bear eats you.

And at still other times, you eat it against the left center field wall. For the second day in a row Michael Harris II, who despite his youth is already one of the best defensive outfielders in the game, came off worse in a confrontation with a fence. On Friday night, the W.B. Mason sign knocked the ball out of his mitt, turning what would’ve been a spectacular catch into an RBI double for Bryce Harper. And not 24 hours later, Harris, the ball, and a neighboring State Farm ad came together to produce an inside-the-park home run for J.T. Realmuto.

With an 8–3 win in front of a bloodthirsty home crowd, the Phillies completed an upset victory over the rival Braves and are on their way to the NLCS. The inside-the-park home run wasn’t the play that made the game; in fact, by win probability, it was only the fourth-most impactful dinger of the afternoon. But if you watch enough baseball, you’ll learn to recognize signs that this just isn’t your day. For the Braves, surrendering the first inside-the-park homer by a catcher in postseason history, minutes after their starter got knocked out of the game by a line drive… signs don’t come much clearer than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine that you were running the Padres, and a genie appeared on July 15. The genie told you you’d carry a one-run lead into the ninth inning of Game 3 in an NLDS clash with the Dodgers. Knowing that, what would you do for the next two weeks? Scramble to the ends of the earth to find the best closer available, that’s what.

Josh Hader stepped to the mound in the top of the ninth inning on Friday night with a one-run lead. He’s been one of the very best relievers in baseball since the first day he stepped on a major league mound. No one has thrown more relief innings since 2017 with a lower ERA. Only 12 relievers have thrown more innings, period. He’s been both durable and dominant — and crucially, available in trade.

Since joining the Padres, Hader has been anything but automatic. There’s reason to wonder whether he’s still a member of that top relief tier; his strikeout rate has plummeted and his walk rate has increased, never a welcome sign for a fastball-dominant reliever. But he’s still Josh Hader, and he put up a vintage Hader month in September. As bullpen toppers go, he’s one of the best. He’d have to be, facing the smallest possible lead against the scariest possible opponent, and in the pressure cooker of the playoffs to boot.

How did the Padres get to this situation that A.J. Preller perfectly outfitted the team for? It’s a long story, and one that wasn’t preordained. If a few early breaks had gone a different way, the Padres might have led by five. They might have trailed. That’s an inevitable fact of baseball. The margins are so slim, the teams so evenly matched from night to night, that no outcome is inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not just that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. It’s that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. Rhys Hoskins would’ve spiked his bat through the ground if he were able.

“I didn’t know what I did until a couple innings later,” Hoskins said after the game. “It’s just something that came out, just raw. But God, it was fun.”

A celebration that emphatic isn’t about happiness, or excitement, or even a desire to get one over on one’s opponent. It’s about catharsis — for Hoskins, his teammates — now a game from the Phillies’ first NLCS since 2010 — and many thousands of their most ardent, and nervous, admirers.

There’s an iron law of Philadelphia sports, little known outside the region but cited frequently within it. As articulated by Twitter user @historiancole: “Philadelphia only has two speeds: cocky or distraught.” This postulate is the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle tweet of Hoagieland; it comes up whenever the lead changes in a Phillies game, the Sixers update their injury report, or the Eagles do anything at any time. It captures the duality of the high-leverage sports experience: exuberance when things are going well, counterbalanced by abject terror that everything will fall apart.

For 11 years, Phillies fans have felt little but pessimism; long gone are the days when they dominated the National League the way the Dodgers do now. In between the team has suffered the slow recognition that a rebuild was necessary, the utter failure to execute that rebuild, and years of futile attempts to patch the wreckage into a playoff team. The 45,538 unfortunates who packed themselves into Citizens Bank Park on Friday afternoon know every contour of this story, and from it they’ve learned to expect the worst. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching an elite starting pitcher at his best can be one of the most exciting things in baseball. Many are familiar with the feeling that no matter who the batter in the box is, the pitcher’s stuff is simply too much to handle, and he’ll be easily set down. But as we all know, not every start ends in a shutout or no-hitter; it can quickly go south no matter how long the hurler has been cruising. After setting down the first six Phillies he faced in NLDS Game 3, Spencer Strider looked more unbeatable than ever. But just a few hitters later, his night would be over, with the game — and potentially the series — out of reach for Atlanta.

The Braves’ announcement that Strider would be the Game 3 starter with Charlie Morton getting the ball for Game 4 said a lot about their expectations from the pitching staff. Strider last pitched on September 18, missing the past month with an oblique injury; starting him the day after Thursday’s scheduled off-day suggested Atlanta might be strictly managing his workload. After all, with relievers like Raisel Iglesias and Collin McHugh who have made multi-inning high-leverage appearances in the past, the Braves were set up well to have their bullpen eat up lots of outs in a close game.

Through the first two innings on Friday, Strider looked like the ace we had seen all season. His fastball touched triple digits, he struck out three, and most impressively, he racked up ten swinging strikes in just six batters. But he opened the third inning with a four-pitch walk to Brandon Marsh, then fought through a long matchup with Jean Segura, who struck out on eight pitches. Next up was nine-hole hitter Bryson Stott, who fouled off four consecutive fastballs in a two-strike count before smashing a slider for a double into right field, scoring Marsh and giving the Phillies a 1–0 lead. Throughout, Strider was showing signs of slowing down. While he sat in the 98–99 mph velocity range for the first two innings, his first three pitches to Stott were thrown at 96, and he missed his spot outside five times. Read the rest of this entry »