Update: The Dodgers announced their NLCS roster this morning, adding Alex Wood and Edwin Ríos and dropping Gavin Lux and Terrance Gore. This gives Los Angeles 15 pitchers for this round. Ríos is still recovering from his groin injury and could be limited to pinch-hitting duties to start the series. The Braves did not make any changes to their roster.

The Atlanta Braves have cruised through the 2020 postseason, sweeping the Reds and the Marlins in the Wild Card and Division Series, respectively. Their pitching staff has pitched four shutouts and allowed a total of just five runs to score in five playoff games. But their two early round opponents were beneficiaries of the expanded playoff format and might not have reflected the normal strength of the playoff teams from years past. In the National League Championship Series, they’ll finally meet their match against a powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers team built to win a World Series.

Despite plenty of recent success, this will be Atlanta’s first appearance in the NLCS since 2001 when they lost to the eventual World Series champion Diamondbacks; they’ve made the playoffs 10 times since. For the Dodgers, this will be their fourth appearance in the NLCS in the last five seasons and their seventh since 2001. Agonizingly, they don’t have a championship to show for all their success in reaching the semi-finals; their last World Series win was in 1988.

Like the Braves, the Dodgers blew through the first two rounds of the playoffs, sweeping both the Brewers and Padres. San Diego was a much stronger opponent for Los Angeles than Miami was for Atlanta. Still, we shouldn’t hold the quality of the past opponents against either team. This series pits the number one seed in the NL against the number two seed. Both of these teams earned their chance to claim the league championship with excellent play all season long.

Both clubs possess a dynamic offense. The Dodgers 122 wRC+ was tied for the best in baseball this year, while the Braves’ 121 was third. They were neck-and-neck as far as runs scored, too, with Los Angeles leading baseball with 349 runs and Atlanta a single run behind them. They were the top two teams in baseball in home runs, slugging, Barrel%, and Hard Hit%. But while both teams can score runs at will, their lineups are built a little differently. Both squads have a handful of stars anchoring their offense, but the Dodgers’ lineup is longer and deeper. There will be no respite for Braves pitchers when facing the seven, eight, and nine hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

When you lose to the Rays, sometimes you get beat by top prospects and players with first-round pedigrees and the kinds of hyper-talented physical freaks who make up the majority of major league rosters. And sometimes you get beat by the back of a bullpen and a light-hitting catcher and a Cuban outfielder who before September was such an unknown that he probably could’ve walked through Ybor City on a Saturday night in full uniform to the attention and recognition of no one.

In taking Game 1 of the ALCS, 2–1, against Houston, Tampa Bay leaned on the parts of its roster that collectively should amount to nothing but ended up making the difference against a team in its fourth pennant series. Blake Snell, the former AL Cy Young winner, started, but given how he wobbled and weaved his way through five difficult innings, he wasn’t the star of this one. (His last inning of work, though, was crucial: Already at 83 pitches and clearly laboring, he was tasked with facing George Springer, Jose Altuve and Michael Brantley for a third time and did so perfectly, sparing Kevin Cash from having to lean even harder on an already exhausted bullpen.) Instead, it was the Rays’ chest full of misfit toys that gave them a 1–0 series lead in this best-of-seven battle.

Case in point: the man who put Tampa Bay on the board, Randy Arozarena. Coming into this series, he’d hit .444/.500/.926 in 30 postseason plate appearances, including three homers in seven games. He treated Yankees pitching like a piñata in the ALDS, and he did the same to Framber Valdez in Game 1, poking a belt-high sinker to right-center in the fourth to make a 1–0 Houston lead vanish. Getting a fastball by Arozarena has proven virtually impossible all month; Valdez learned that the hard way. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: The Rays did indeed add Josh Fleming, along with José Alvarado, who had been on the Injured List with a shoulder issue; the team DFA’ed Oliver Drake to make room for Alvarado on the 40-man. Trevor Richards and Brett Phillips were dropped from the ALCS roster to make room for Fleming and Alvarado. The Astros, meanwhile, added Chase de Jong and bumped Chas McCormick from their ALCS roster.

Sunday’s American League Championship Series Game 1 begins the next layer of MLB’s grueling postseason schedule, one where each club’s pitching depth will be tested by the best lineup they’ve faced all year without the grace of an off day for travel. Two teams, seven games, in seven days (if necessary).

Let’s touch on the narrative. This series pits an infamous-but-talented Houston Astros team, whose players are publicly engaged in cognitive dissonance as a means of self-motivation, against a Rays team sometimes incorrectly billed as an underdog because of its sparse, owner-imposed payroll, even though Tampa was the AL’s top seed. There’s the intrigue of longtime Rays employee (and new Astros GM) James Click facing his old club while he and manager Dusty Baker try to shepherd the franchise through a PR hell that’s probably going to last longer than the pandemic. Houston’s young pitchers (a well that never seems to run dry) led by breakout third-year lefty Framber Valdez and a slew of great rookies who can go multiple innings in relief, face a dynamic group of Rays hitters who run 12 or 13 deep, and punish opponents by creating tough, mid-game matchups.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Yesterday the Astros announced Valdez would start Game 1 on the usual four days rest, while ALDS Game 1 starter Lance McCullers Jr. will go in Game 2 on extended rest. Both work heavily off their sinkers and curveballs, especially Valdez, whose changeup usage dwindled throughout the regular season before totally evaporating in the playoffs. He threw no cambios in the Wild Card round, and tossed just four of them in his ALDS start against the A’s, throwing one to Ramón Laureano and Chad Pinder each time he faced them.

Blake Snell will take the ball for Tampa Bay in Game 1, and while they haven’t announced it yet, it’s fair to anticipate former Astro Charlie Morton going in Game 2 and Tyler Glasnow in Game 3, though that’s more an educated guess than a certainty. In Friday’s ALDS Game 5, Glasnow threw on two days rest, his bullpen day, meaning Sunday’s Game 1 would be his scheduled day to start if the Rays just replaced his routine bullpen with his Game 5 outing. I think the structure of the Championship Series (seven games in as many days) means we’re unlikely to see an extended outing from Glasnow early in this series (he threw 93 pitches in his first ALDS start) since there’s an old-school style importance to starting pitchers going deep into games, forcing Tampa Bay to start and get bulk innings from Glasnow rather than piggybacking him. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Wilken was the club’s scouting director when the Chicago Cubs drafted DJ LeMahieu out of LSU in 2009. Wilken was still ensconced in that position two years later when he had a memorable exchange with the second-rounder. It took place in Knoxville, where LeMahieu — a product of Brother Rice High School in metro Detroit —was playing with the Double-A Tennessee Smokies.

“I said, ‘Hey, DJ, you stay inside the ball extremely well [but] you’re six-foot-five and don’t really let your swing out,” Wilken related to me recently. “You’re from Michigan; were you a fan of Derek Jeter? Do you stay inside the ball because he does that?’ He said, ‘No, I like Derek Jeter, but when you live in a northern state you have a tendency to stay with your swing because 95% of your BP is inside, in a cage. Had I lived in a sunbelt state, I might have started to let my swing out.’”

I asked the longtime scout — now a special assistant with the Arizona Diamondbacks — why a lack of outdoor reps might have that result.

“If you’re in a cage — and I’ve seen many cage batting practices — hitters kind of stay within their swing,” responded Wilken, who in 2016 was inducted into the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame. “LeMahieu hits a lot of balls up the middle and to the right side — every once in awhile he’ll pull a ball — but as he was describing to me, it’s a lot different inside. You don’t get to see the results of letting your swing out, so you don’t really turn on balls. Outside, you can see some of that power. Hitting a ball to left field and seeing it go a pretty good ways… that’s taken away when you’re in a cage.” Read the rest of this entry »

There are stories athletes must tell themselves to kick in an extra gear of motivation totally foreign to many of us. To feed the adrenaline that needs to flow through your body in order to square up a fastball thrown at 100 miles per hour. They are stories about the athlete being under attack; by a public that doesn’t believe in them, by the media that unfairly targets them, by the rival who has crossed and provoked them. Some of those stories are completely true, others less so — most people probably expect professional baseball players to do well, and the grudges they hold may be ones we aren’t aware of.

Everyone, however, was aware of the grudge between Mike Brosseau and Aroldis Chapman. The heater Chapman threw at Brosseau — who dodged it at the very last moment with mere inches to spare — has been replayed and analyzed since it caused the benches to clear during an otherwise quiet game on September 1, and served to ratchet up a tense division rivalry. So when Brosseau came up to bat against Chapman with the game tied in the bottom of the eighth of Friday’s do-or-die ALDS Game 5, the idea of the at-bat deciding both team’s seasons was simultaneously far-fetched and a narrative far too convenient.

Ten pitches later, Brosseau’s swing made the far-fetched reality. That terrifying fastball darted not toward his head, but over the inside corner of the plate, and Brosseau snuck the barrel of his bat through the zone just hard enough to send the ball over the Petco Park fence, and the Rays’ dugout into pandemonium. It was the go-ahead run the Rays needed to defeat the Yankees, 2-1, and punch their ticket to the ALCS.

The Rays will face the Houston Astros in Game 1 of the ALCS on Sunday at 7:37 p.m. EST. Read the rest of this entry »

7:01	Dan Szymborski: It is a time for baseball.

7:02	Dan Szymborski: I’m just glad we got *a* Game 5!

7:02	Dan Szymborski: Between two and four runs allowed, margin of error six!

Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West and Central. Below is my assessment of the AL East, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

By blowing out the Padres to sweep the Division Series and advance to the National League Championship Series against the Braves, the Dodgers were able to skirt the matter, but by now it’s apparent that for as strong as they have looked thus far in the postseason, they have a closer problem. Manager Dave Roberts has spent the past four weeks limiting Kenley Jansen’s exposure, even in save situations, and in Game 2 of the series, had to go so far as to pull the 33-year-old three-time All-Star because things were getting out of hand; in the end, the Dodgers barely escaped that game with a 6-5 victory. Because he had pitched two days in a row, Jansen was deemed unavailable for Game 3, but even with a vote of confidence, the question of how much longer he’ll be the automatic choice to shut the door will linger.

In the grand scheme, Jansen is an incredible success story, a Curaçao-born converted catcher who spent his first eight major league seasons utterly dominating hitters; for the 2010-17 span, he struck out 40.1%, walked 6.8%, and posted a 2.08 ERA and 1.84 FIP, numbers that put him on the same tier as Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel and nobody else as far as sustained success for the period. His recent seasons have been rocky, however. In 2018, he posted career worsts in ERA and FIP (3.01 and 4.03) in a season interrupted by a bout of atrial fibrillation and then issues finding the right level of medication; in late November, he underwent an ablation procedure. In 2019, as his velocity continued to wane, he set new career worsts with a 3.71 ERA and eight blown saves, three more than he had in the previous two seasons combined.

Jansen reported late to summer camp due to a positive test for COVID-19, but was ready in time to start the season, and in fact pitched well into early September. In his first 17 innings, he posted a 1.04 ERA and 3.01 FIP, with a 35.8% strikeout rate — higher than it had been since 2017 — while converting 10 out of 11 save chances. Then came an unsettling pair of outings. On September 8 against the Diamondbacks, he entered with two outs in the ninth inning of a tie game, escaped via a weird stolen base-error-baserunning blunder sequence by Tim Locastro, and after the Dodgers scored four runs in the top of the 10th, gave three back in the bottom of the inning before getting the final out. Read the rest of this entry »