Two years ago, the Giants won 107 games, and Gabe Kapler was voted NL Manager of the Year. Last year, the Mets won 101 games, and Buck Showalter was voted NL Manager of the Year. But both teams were bounced out of the postseason in their first playoff series nonetheless, and with both teams struggling to return to such heights thereafter, the two managers lost their jobs this past weekend after their teams asked in effect, “What have you won for me lately?” The Giants fired Kapler on Friday with the team holding a 78–81 record; the Mets (then 74–86) announced before Sunday’s finale that they were moving on from Showalter.

Kapler and Showalter were the first two managers to lose their jobs in 2023, but not the last, as the Angels decided to move on from Phil Nevin, who was in the last year of his contract, on Monday after a 73–89 finish. The Padres and Yankees haven’t officially confirmed the status of their incumbents, but Bob Melvin and Aaron Boone remain under contract through next season, with the Yankees holding an option on Boone for 2025 as well. Read the rest of this entry »

After missing out on the postseason last year, breaking a four-year streak, the Brewers are back in the playoffs this year. They’ve been the model of consistency over this past half decade; they are the only other team apart from the Astros and Dodgers to have won at least 86 games in each of the last six full seasons. But for all that regular season success, they’ve only won one postseason series during this stretch, a Division Series back in 2018. They have one of the strongest run prevention units in baseball and are hoping that will carry them deep into October.

Milwaukee’s first-round opponent, the Diamondbacks, will be making their first playoff appearance since 2017. They’re breaking out of a long rebuilding cycle a little ahead of schedule thanks to the phenomenal rookie campaign of Corbin Carroll. On paper, they’re significant underdogs when compared to the dominant arms the Brewers can bring to bear, but they’ve got enough young talent to make some noise as a surprise contender:

Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners, the Cubs, and other teams that just missed the playoffs, discuss the firings of Giants manager Gabe Kapler and Mets manager Buck Showalter (19:21), and then (32:51) bring on FanGraphs writers Michael Baumann and Ben Clemens to assemble an ultimate playoff team by drafting components of existing playoff teams: hitting, baserunning, defense, starting pitching, relief pitching, and managing.

Audio intro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Raleigh comments
Link to Raleigh apology
Link to Woodruff update
Link to FG playoff predictions
Link to BP on Framber
Link to study on waiting in line
Link to Petriello on the Rays pen
Link to Petriello on playoff Castellanos
Link to more on playoff Castellanos
Link to even more on playoff Castellanos
Link to preseason predictions pod
Link to preseason predictions standings

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The race to the playoffs provided plenty of drama over the past month. The battle for a Wild Card spot ended up coming down to the wire in both leagues, and the AL West wasn’t completely wrapped up until the final day of the season. But we’ve finally made it to the main event, where anything can happen and underdogs can topple giants. Here’s a look at the 12 teams in the playoffs and how they stack up against each other.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. Since regular season records don’t matter in the playoffs, I’ve removed the factors for win percentage and expected win percentage from the calculations. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite being second and third in record among AL clubs and sporting the top two run differentials in the Junior Circuit, the Rays and Rangers will meet in the wild card round as the fourth and fifth seeds, respectively. Tampa Bay secured the top wild card spot after losing a close division race, finishing just two games behind the first-place Orioles, the only 100-win team in the AL, and will play host to the Rangers. Their 90 wins tied them with the Astros for first place in the West, but they lost the division crown via tiebreaker under the new rules that sent Game 163 into extinction. These two squads may be a bit above the caliber of the average wild card series, but only one will be on a flight to Baltimore this weekend for the ALDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the novelties we’re going to see this postseason, this series is one of the weirdest. The Phillies and Marlins have never met in the postseason before. In fact, they’d never made the playoffs in the same season before; apart from a stretch from 2003 to ’09 when it seemed like they only ever played each other, the two franchises had never even finished above .500 in the same season before.

But here we are: Three games to determine who gets eternal claim to the legacy of Darren Daulton and Alex Arias, and more importantly, a berth in the NLDS against Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

The end of the regular season is always bittersweet for me. On one hand, playoff baseball is one of my favorite times of year. Taking the leisurely pace of the game and injecting it with win-or-go-home drama makes for great viewing. Who could forget last year’s rally goose, or Bryce Harper’s monster NLCS-deciding homer? Who could forget the Astros winning one for Dusty?

But there’s no more regular-season baseball to watch, and that’s also something I love. No-drama afternoons, sixth innings where your team is down five and the announcers are looking for something to talk about — that’s the regular rhythm of my summer, and it’ll be weird to move on without it. So to ease the transition from one style of baseball to another, I gathered a few whimsical things and a few high-drama things and combined them into one, well, Five Things. Read the rest of this entry »