BOSTON — It’s a shame that one team had to lose. In a game that will go down as a postseason classic, the Boston Red Sox walked off the Tampa Bay Rays, 6–4, on a 13th-inning home run by Christian Vázquez to win Game 3 of the ALDS and take a 2–1 series lead.

Now, on to what transpired.

The eventful first inning epitomized modern-era baseball. Red Sox right-hander Nathan Eovaldi fanned three Rays batters in the top half but also gave up an Austin Meadows home run — a 406-foot shot off the back wall of the visiting bullpen — that followed a Wander Franco single. In the bottom half, Rays right-hander Drew Rasmussen was taken deep by Kyle Schwarber — this one at 390 feet — but then fanned Rafael Devers after giving up a 104.8-mph single off the Green Monster by Enrique Hernández.

Eight batters into the game, we had four strikeouts, two home runs, and a pair of singles, one of which would have been a double in 29 other ballparks. Moreover, all four batted balls were hit with triple-digit exit velocity. Again, modern-era baseball: whiffs, dingers, and Statcast readings to measure it all. A three-strikeout, one-walk top of the second only added to the three-true-outcome mix. Read the rest of this entry »

Meg Rowley and guest co-host Mike Ferrin of MLB Network Radio discuss his recent trip to Monument Valley before recapping the weekend’s ALDS and NLDS action and looking ahead to what might come next, including thoughts on the Giants’ approach to platooning, Cody Bellinger‘s season-long slump, AJ Pollock‘s past postseason woes, the Brewers offense, Eduardo Escobar, Milwaukee’s bullpen, Atlanta’s starters, Houston’s bats, Craig Kimbrel‘s role, Wander Franco, the Rays’ young starters, J.D. Martinez and Kiké Hernández providing thump in Boston’s lineup, and Alex Cora’s strategy to contain Tampa’s offense. Then Meg and Mike listener emails on spitting, the strike zone, a robo ump compromise, a creative proposal to score series rather than games, and rookies adjusting to the big leagues. Plus, a Statblast/Meet a Major Leaguer combo on player debuts versus and for the Kansas City Royals. Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Baseball lends itself to stories, October baseball perhaps most of all. During the regular season, a team’s narrative can unfurl slowly. The postseason, by contrast, is marked by the frantic crowning of heroes and chokers. Subplots abound, and the identity of the game’s central character isn’t always clear until the late innings.

After losing to the San Francisco Giants, 4–0, in Game 1 of the NLDS, the Los Angeles Dodgers hoped to even the series on Saturday. The Giants, for their part, were looking to push the Dodgers to the edge of elimination. In the process, the two teams told three different tales.

The Hero’s Journey, Deferred
If you had told the Giants in June that Kevin Gausman would be starting Game 2 of the NLDS, they would have been thrilled. Heading into the All-Star break, he had posted a 1.73 ERA and a 2.57 FIP, led by a four-seam fastball that finishes batters high and a devilish splitter that wipes them out low and is among the best in the game.

But after a scintillating first half, Gausman faltered. He posted a 4.42 ERA and a 3.65 FIP. His splitter had less sink. He tinkered with his pitch mix, toying with throwing more sliders and what Pitch Info classifies as changeups, though not to particularly great effect. The final month of the season suggested a course correction, though not quite a return to form, an assessment seemingly shared by Gabe Kapler when he tapped Logan Webb to start Game 1 of the series.

And for the first few innings of Saturday’s game, you could see why. Gausman threw first-pitch balls to three of the first four batters he faced. In the second, Chris Taylor doubled. After a Cody Bellinger strikeout, Gausman fell behind AJ Pollock, 2–0, and Kapler opted to put him on intentionally to get to Julio Urías. But the pitcher and his .203 season average slapped a hanging splitter for a single, scoring Taylor; Mookie Betts followed with an RBI single of his own (his third hit this series and fifth this postseason).

It looked like Gausman’s night might end half an inning later, as Kapler almost pinch hit Tommy La Stella for his starter when San Francisco threatened after a Wilmer Flores walk and a Brandon Crawford single. Ultimately, though, he thought better of it when a Donovan Solano sacrifice fly plated a run and pushed the Giants to two outs, and Gausman rewarded that faith by settling down and retiring the next nine batters he faced. It seemed like it might be the sort of start that, provided the Giants rallied, would be described as gritty — not dominant, but necessary in the march to the World Series.

Then the sixth inning hit.

Read the rest of this entry »

In what might be the most-thrilling play we’ll see all October, Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Randy Arozarena successfully executed a straight steal of home in Game One of the ALDS. Moments later, I shared the following on Twitter:

“Instead of calmly throwing a ball right down the middle for strike three to end the inning, Taylor panicked.”

Journalist friend Bruce Schoenfeld responded as follows:

“That is exactly right. I kept waiting for the announcers to say it. I wrote a [Sports Illustrated] piece on straight steals of home & talked to every active player who’d done it. They agreed that nobody should ever try with two out and two strikes, All the pitcher has to do is throw a strike.”

In other words, Arozarena’s theft could have been nullified.

I checked with a rules expert to make sure Bruce and I weren’t mistaken. According to Chris Welsh — a former big-league pitcher and current Cincinnati Reds radio and TV analyst who runs the website Baseball Rules Academy — we had it right. Had Red Sox reliever Josh Taylor simply remained on the rubber and thrown a pitch that landed in strike zone, the batter would have been out and the inning would have been over. Instead, he made the mistake of stepping off, thereby making himself a fielder and not a pitcher. His hurried heave toward home plate wasn’t nearly in time.

Again, there were two outs and two strikes on the batter. Read the rest of this entry »

For both the Braves and Brewers, postseason success shares a similar blueprint: length from the starters, timely hits from the lineup, hope for the best with the bullpen (albeit at different times). Milwaukee executed that to perfection in Game 1 of this NLDS; in Game 2, it was Atlanta’s turn, with the Braves drawing the series even with a 3–0 win.

The difference on Saturday was Max Fried, who out-dueled Brandon Woodruff with six shutout innings, striking out nine against just three hits and zero walks. The lefty needed only 81 pitches to record his 18 outs before giving way to three relievers, who dodged plenty of trouble but managed to secure the final three frames with no damage. Like Corbin Burnes in Game 1, Fried didn’t so much beat opposing batters as brush them aside; Willy Adames was the lone Brewer to make it as far as second base against him on a sixth-inning double. Most of his outing was whiffs and soft contact, with Adames’ double the only ball in play he allowed to crack the 100 mph exit velocity mark. At-bats and innings were over in flashes.

The explanation for Fried’s success is simple: He threw strikes. Of his 81 pitches, 58 were in the zone, a 71.6% rate, which he pounded with his four-seamer — humming in at 95 mph on average — before busting out his slider and curve to finish things. Not normally a big swing-and-miss pitcher, he racked up a dozen whiffs on the day, six on the slider, to go with a CSW (called strikes + whiffs) rate of 40%; of his nine strikeouts, seven were swinging. By the time the middle innings rolled around, he’d found a groove: The final 10 Brewers hitters he faced all started their at-bats with a strike, and just two of them reached base. Read the rest of this entry »

It took more than a quarter century of Wild Card-era postseason baseball to give us a series between two of the National League’s most iconic franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. The chromatic contrast of both teams’ classic-looking threads, and the tone and intensity of Oracle Park, provided a rich backdrop for a Game 1 Giants victory, a 4-0 contest played with the breakneck pace of a minor league game on getaway day.

Jerry Rice and Steve Young are basically the warm up act here #ResilientSF #NLDS#Postseason pic.twitter.com/V71WpFOUn5

— Kate Rooney (@TheKateRooney) October 9, 2021

The driving force for that pace? Logan Webb, the Giants 24-year-old starter who quickly ushered Dodgers hitters back to the bench in the best start of his young career, hurling 7.2 shutout innings while surrendering just five hits, walking none, and striking out 10. Webb and the Giants have tinkered with his delivery and repertoire a few times over the last three seasons, and they’ve settled on a release point that’s added more sink to his changeup, which has become his best pitch. He threw more changeups in Game 1 than any other offering, inducing 12 of his whopping 21 whiffs on the pitch.

Webb did much of the out-getting work on his own. In addition to striking out 10, a career high, he also collected four Dodgers grounders himself, making him solely responsible for 14 of the 23 outs he induced. Beyond the tallied whiffs, the Dodgers juggernaut lineup had many uncomfortable-looking takes and partial swings against Webb.

All four Giants runs came via the home run, apt considering San Francisco led the big leagues in dingers this season. Buster Posey drew first blood, shooting a 3-0 pitch the opposite way in the first inning. It one-hopped into McCovey Cove and per the broadcast, it was the first home run Walker Buehler has surrendered on a 3-0 pitch during his major-league career (it was only the fourth time Posey has hit a home run in that count).

Both Webb and Buehler coasted through the middle innings. After surrendering a leadoff oppo single to Mookie Betts in the first (Betts went 2-for-4, hitting the single and spanking a hanging Webb slider in the eighth), Webb didn’t allow another hit until the fifth. A couple of harmless singles flecked Buehler’s middle-frames, and neither team did any damage again until the seventh. The few who reached base were quickly erased by great defense. A Webb error that allowed Corey Seager to reach in the fourth was expunged by a gorgeous 4-6-3 double play that saw La Stella and Crawford crisscross around the bag.

It was the fourth inning when Buehler first started to show real cracks. He surrendered a well-struck single to Kris Bryant, who had three hits, including a homer, and took several very comfortable swings against Buehler throughout the night, and then narrowly escaped a would-be double by Mike Yastrzemski, who hooked a cutter just foul down the right field line. With two outs in that situation, Bryant may have scored from first on a double. It took Buehler surprising Yaz with a gutsy full-count changeup, his first cambio of the night, to escape. (An aside: take a look at Buehler’s changeup usage by game this year.) The Giants couldn’t score despite two well-struck balls in play in the fifth: an Evan Longoria fly out and a Tommy La Stella single sandwiched around the pitcher’s spot. Buehler stabilized and moved quickly through the sixth and was left in to face Bryant to start the seventh.

Three-hundred-and-eighty-nine feet later, the Giants had padded their lead to three. Buehler finished having worked 6.1 innings of three-run ball, allowing seven base runners while striking out five. He managed to induce just 12 swinging strikes in 99 total pitches, and his fastball’s spin rate was down a full 200 rpm compared to his 2020 rate.

Webb’s “challenges” came later. He surrendered a two-out double to Seager in the sixth (the hardest-hit ball of the night at 111 mph), and then hung a slider to Will Smith, who also doubled, in the seventh. After each double, Webb struck out hitters until each inning ended. After seven, he had struck out 10 Dodgers on just 77 pitches.

A Brandon Crawford solo shot in eighth — Dodgers reliever Alex Vesia had blown fastballs past the previous two hitters, then left a breaking ball in Crawford’s happy zone — capped the scoring for the Giants.

Dodgers hitters were flummoxed by Webb all night, and four of them tallied multiple strikeouts in Game 1. The bottom of the Dodgers order (Matt Beaty, AJ Pollock, and Cody Bellinger, plus the pitcher’s spot) went 0-for-12, a cakewalk for Giants pitching. Pollock had been super hot, homering five times in the 10 late-September games he played after returning from a hamstring injury, while Beaty is replacing the injured Max Muncy; Bellinger has been mired in a long, concerning funk.

With the benefit of uncharitable hindsight, it might be correct to question Dave Roberts‘ decision to leave Buehler in to face Bryant for a third time. The desire to extend Buehler’s start as long as possible did preserve the Dodgers bullpen for Game 2, though, as none of Los Angeles’ relievers — Brusdar Graterol, Vesia, and Phil Bickford — threw more than 10 pitches in this one, and all should be available tomorrow.

Gabe Kapler was afforded the opportunity to get 24-year-old sidewinder Camilo Doval into his first postseason game with a sizable lead. Doval, who assumed closer duties late in the year, has seemingly “found it” after dealing with stretches of extreme wildness during his minor league career. He’s already one of baseball’s more electric relievers, eliciting ugly swings on his big-bending slider and slinging 100 mph with natural cut right past big league hitters.

Saturday’s Game 2 (9:07 ET) pits Giants righty Kevin Gausman against Dodgers lefty Julio Urías. Both teams, which feature a lot of moving parts, will likely shuffle their lineups. After the game, Roberts told reports that Bellinger will return to first base while Taylor starts in center field. On the Giants side, look for some or all of the right-handed hitting Darin Ruf, Donovan Solano, and Austin Slater to start against Urías. We’ll all watch to see if the Dodgers’ adjustments take, while wishing these two teams could play a seven-game series instead of five.

This could have been Tampa Bay’s night. In an alternate, presumably domed and cat-walked universe, starter Shane Baz shakes off a tough start, and builds on his escape from a first-inning jam. The Rays, invigorated by their five-run rally off of Chris Sale in the bottom of the first, pour it on against Boston’s beleaguered bullpen.

It didn’t go that way. Jordan Luplow’s go-ahead grand slam off of Sale was just about the last highlight of the night for Tampa, as Boston outscored the division-winners 13-1 the rest of the way. Boston’s offensive explosion pulled the Red Sox back from the brink of a 2-0 series deficit, and ensured that ace Nathan Eovaldi gets to start in front of the Fenway faithful with a chance to take the lead in the ALDS. And while Boston’s offense did the heavy lifting, the key to the game may have come all the way back in the second inning, when Alex Cora pulled Sale in favor of Tanner Houck.

For my money, Houck is the most compelling player in the series. He pitched brilliantly down the stretch, notching a 2.52 FIP over 69 innings split between the bullpen and the rotation, and capped his season off with five perfect innings in a start last weekend against Washington. For the year, he struck out more than 30% of hitters while also generating more grounders than flies. Beyond the numbers, he’s just a real bastard to face. His low slot and deadly, sweeping slider draw inevitable comparisons to Sale, and he has one of the most devastating sinkers in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League Division Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Milwaukee Brewers got off to a low-scoring start on Friday afternoon, with Corbin Burnes dueling Charlie Morton for six innings. Offense was nearly nowhere to be found, as the teams combined for just nine hits against 18 strikeouts. The three runs came on two hits: a two-run shot by Rowdy Tellez in the bottom of the seventh and a solo follow-up by Joc Pederson the next half-inning:

That wasn’t the only big moment of the night by Tellez, as the husky first baseman made a solid throw to nail Jorge Soler at the plate for the back end of an Ozzie Albies double play ball in the first inning. That run turned out to be the difference. Read the rest of this entry »