Postseason baseball is supposed to be nonsense, a combination of drama and chaos that results in the best laid plans and prognostications of men and metrics being ruined with ease. Every now and then though, you get a game or series that plays out on the field the way it should on paper. Such was the case in Tampa, where the No. 1 seed Rays did as everyone expected and swept the eighth-seeded Blue Jays out of the way with a comfortable 8–2 win in Game 2 to advance to the Division Series.

There was a chance, before things began, that the scrappy young Jays could maybe steal one off the Rays and force things to a winner-take-all Game 3. But the deck was arranged so heavily in Tampa’s favor that those odds were low from the start and plunged as it went on. The Rays had a better and more flexible lineup. They had a better rotation. They had a better and deeper bullpen. They had a better defense that was always in the right spot at the right time. They had home field advantage (for whatever that’s worth when the official attendance is just the few dozen Rays employees and team family members who were sitting in an otherwise empty Tropicana Field). Toronto’s best selling point was that anything can and often does happen in a short series, and the Rays snuffed that out so quickly that, by the time the third inning of Game 2 rolled around, it was hard to see how anyone at all had talked themselves into a Jays upset.

The best hope Toronto had was the man on the mound, left-hander Hyun-jin Ryu. After excelling in his first regular season with the Blue Jays, the rock of the rotation had been pushed to Game 2 to get him some extra rest. That decision didn’t work out. With his team’s season on the line, Ryu needed 25 pitches to get through the first inning, in which he loaded the bases with none out and somehow allowed only a single run. He couldn’t escape his doom in the second, however. A Kevin Kiermaier single and a Mike Zunino homer made it 3–0. Six batters later, with the bases again loaded, Hunter Renfroe lofted a high cutter into the left-field corner for a grand slam. Just like that, it was 7–0 Rays. Ryu’s day was done, and so were the Blue Jays. Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins’ postseason losing streak reached 18 games Wednesday afternoon after a 3-1 defeat at the hands of the Houston Astros. They haven’t won a postseason game since 2004 and haven’t won a postseason series since 2002. Yesterday, it was poor defense that led to their loss; today it was a total lack of punch from their bats. Four Astros pitchers — Jose Urquidy, Brooks Raley, Cristian Javier, and Ryan Pressly — combined to hold Minnesota to just three hits and a single run.

For the Astros, their two-game sweep is a little bit of vindication after entering the playoffs with the worst regular season record amongst the American League field — not to mention the lingering skepticism from their sign-stealing scandal. Houston’s bats didn’t carry the load; rather, it was the injury-wracked pitching staff that got them through this short series. A day after Zack Greinke and Framber Valdez shut down the Twins offense, Urquidy and three relievers were just as strong in the series clinching game.

The game started off much like yesterday’s did. The Twins loaded the bases in the first inning but couldn’t push a run across. After throwing 26 pitches in the first, Urquidy settled in and cruised through the next three innings. He allowed just three hard hit batted balls, all of which came in the fourth inning but amounted to a harmless single. He relied heavily on his fastball, throwing it 64% of the time on Wednesday, 10 points higher than his season average. It was a little surprising to see so many heaters from him since his changeup is so good and the Twins had six left-handed batters in their lineup. But the game plan seemed to be focused on fastballs up in the zone and it was extremely effective: He generated six whiffs and seven fly ball outs with his four-seamer.

The Astros scored their first run of the game in the fourth on a seeing-eye single off the bat of Kyle Tucker. Twins starter José Berríos had looked like he was in complete control through three innings but walked two straight batters with two outs and paid for that lapse in command with a run. Read the rest of this entry »

OAKLAND — Chris Bassitt spent the month of September on the best streak of his life. In four regular season starts, he allowed exactly one run, a Joey Gallo homer. That works out to a 0.34 ERA, but it was far more than that: it won Bassitt Pitcher of the Month honors and essentially guaranteed him a start in the playoffs.

Why wasn’t more made of Bassitt’s September? Because it looked, well, like Chris Bassitt pitching. He struck out 24.8% of his opponents while walking 4.8%. His 12.4% swinging strike rate barely cracked the top 20 starters on the month. He turned those middling stats into dominance by stranding 100% of the runners he allowed to reach base. He also put up a stellar 3.7% HR/FB mark; hit the ball in the air against Bassitt, and it simply went nowhere.

The A’s know that, but they also knew something else: good luck in September or not, unsustainable sequencing or not, Bassitt is their second-best starting pitcher at the moment. With their backs against the wall, they turned to him to keep their season going — and he put the White Sox to sleep in much the same way he befuddled batters all September.

This wasn’t Lucas Giolito overwhelming the A’s the day before, or Trevor Bauer and Max Fried throwing matching gems today. It was ugly but effective in the same way that Bassitt’s September was: an inch off the barrel here, an escape from a jam there, and pretty soon, baby you’ve got a good start going.
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The Miami Marlins haven’t had a winning season since 2009, and coming into the year, there was every reason to think that the club’s playoff drought would eventually extend into a second decade. But with an expanded field, key contributions from rookies, and unexpectedly solid play around the infield, Miami slipped past the velvet ropes for the first time in 17 years.

Amusingly, the Marlins are the only franchise in baseball to never lose a playoff series. After a 5-1 victory in Game 1 of the Wild Card round, they’re just one win from extending their perfect record.

The importance of any one playoff game underscores how differently most of us watch them than regular season fare. Granular events — a single at-bat, a pitch even — take on much more resonance. In the regular season, a failure to execute in the early innings will be forgotten minutes later. Watching closely though, you recognize how missed opportunities shape a game every bit as much as the highlights shown on SportsCenter. Viewed under the microscope, baseball becomes a game of chances taken and chances missed.

For the Marlins, the early part of the game was dominated by the latter. Take Garrett Cooper’s at-bat in the fourth. With one out and a runner on third, Cooper had a great opportunity to plate the game’s first run. On a windy day, against a pitcher with below-average strikeout numbers, this was an opportunity to hunt for a ball he could hit in the air. Instead, he swung at the first pitch and grounded to third. Jesús Aguilar couldn’t advance, and was ultimately stranded after another ground out.

An inning later, the Marlins spurned another chance. With two on and nobody out, light-hitting Chad Wallach was ordered to bunt. The run expectancy table suggests swinging away is the better option here, but it’s very close, and given Wallach’s weak bat and the quality of his opponent, the bunt seemed like a reasonable option. He couldn’t get it down though, and eventually tapped into a rally-killing double play. Read the rest of this entry »

Our preview of the Braves-Reds series, which ran yesterday, closed with the following words:

“This one looks fun, and it should ultimately come down to which team pitches best.”

This afternoon’s Game 1 neither proved nor disproved that prediction. In a matchup of two National League Cy Young contenders, both pitching staffs flat out shoved. Trevor Bauer and Max Fried combined to go 14 2/3 scoreless — with 17 strikeouts and no walks, no less — and the relievers that followed them to the mound were every bit as good. In the end, Atlanta prevailed 1-0 on a walk-off single by Freddie Freeman off Amir Garrett in the 13th inning.

Both teams came out swinging. Three pitches into the game, the Reds had runners on the corners, courtesy of base knocks by Nick Senzel and Nick Castellanos. The aggression-fueled early scoring opportunity went for naught. Fried proceeded to record three outs on six pitches, with an Eugenio Suárez liner to short sandwiched between a pair of harmless ground balls. Read the rest of this entry »

1:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to today’s Wild Card Series Day 2 chat. I’ll be joined here by Dan Szymborski, Tony Wolfe and maybe Meg Rowley in due course

1:01	Jay Jaffe: we’re all going to have baseball coming out of our ears by the time today is over

1:02	Jay Jaffe: Reds-Braves is already going, Astros-Twins about to start, Marlins Cubs at 2 pm ET, White Sox-A’s at 3, Blue Jays-Rays at 4, C, Cardinals-Padres at 5

1:02	Jay Jaffe: (pauses to catch breath)

1:02	Jay Jaffe: Yankees-Indians at 7 ET, and finally Dodgers-Brewers at 10

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The comments will tell you that the victory is worthless. The division was bad. The Diamondbacks, the team they overtook, the team they just beat to win the title — bad. These guys, I mean, how long has it been since these guys won anything, since they got anywhere? Three years, four? Twenty? There are few fans in the dark stadium seats to see this victory, dappled in weird midday light.

But the young closer, so dominant this season, retires the final batter, quick and easy, the final score set at 7-6. And then they, the visitors, pour out of the dugout, the fans who have traveled to see this happen beaming above them — running, hugging, jumping, all happiness gravitating around that spot on the field where the closer stands, even as the scowls come from the other dugout, the home team exiting, heads down and deflated.

You have to slow it down, all the spinning celebration, to see him: the pitcher, one of the first blurry figures over the dugout fence, sprinting at full speed, there a moment and then gone into the grey-blue heart of the celebration. He is the best player on this team. He is the best pitcher in baseball. Right now, though, he is not a singular figure. You can make him out, but you have to squint. He is absorbed in the dynamism of joy.

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It took a few days longer than it did last year. But they are at home, the towering curves of the stands filled with people, all of them standing. The pitch — the ball, grounded into the infield — the twirl, the spin, the out recorded just in time, even though the stakes are so low, the score is 9-1, the celebration only waiting to happen. And the camera knows to focus on him this time, the first out of the dugout again. Like a kid: a broad, open-mouthed smile as the fireworks burst, as the foundations shake and the lights flash and everything spills into everything, all motion, all joy. He puts on his hat and grins for the cameras.

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By the time Shane Bieber recorded his first out in Tuesday night’s American League Wild Card Series opener, the Yankees had already done what teams failed to do in seven of the 25-year-old righty’s 12 starts in 2020: score two runs. With a DJ LeMahieu bloop and an Aaron Judge blast, the Yankees staked themselves to an instant lead, and they continued to beat up on the presumptive AL Cy Young winner, cuffing him for seven runs before chasing him in the fifth inning. The marquee matchup between Bieber and Yankees ace Gerrit Cole turned into a one-sided rout, with the Yankees rolling to a 12-3 win in Cleveland.

Bieber, for as otherworldly as he was this year — he not only won the AL pitching triple crown by leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, but also led in FIP, WAR, K%, and K-BB% — did allow seven home runs, as if to hint that he was merely human. Two of those were on fastballs, one in the center of the strike zone, hit by the Reds’ Eugenio Suárez on August 4. In fact, that was the only hit out of the 28 fastballs Bieber threw down Broadway, just 11 of which were put into play. Judge didn’t have to know how rare it was for Bieber to leave one there to do business with it:

The home run — 108 mph off the bat, with an estimated distance of 399 feet — was Judge’s first since August 11, the same day on which he strained his right calf muscle. To that point, he led the majors in homers, but he landed on the Injured List a few days later, and re-injured the calf in his first game back on August 26. Since the initial injury, he hit just .205/.326/.231 in 46 plate appearances spread out over 47 days. While his exit velocity remained respectable, he didn’t elevate the ball with the same consistency, or come close to doing the same kind of damage:

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Tampa Bay Rays left-hander Blake Snell’s start in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series against the Toronto Blue Jays began so well it may have made even his own manager sweat. Snell hadn’t thrown more than 5.2 innings in any of his 11 starts this season, and he wasn’t expected to pitch far beyond that point on Tuesday. But then five innings came and went in the blink of an eye, and Snell looked untouchable. After just 65 pitches, he had eight strikeouts against just two walks and hadn’t allowed a single hit. Every projectile hurled from Snell’s left arm seemed to send shivers down the Blue Jays’ spines, but every impotent whiff also threatened the always-scientific Kevin Cash with a serious conundrum: How long could the Rays manager allow himself to stick with his starter in a 1-0 game before interrupting a playoff no-hitter himself, a sin many of his team’s fans may find unforgivable?

Alas, that breaking point never arrived. Rookie sensation Alejandro Kirk lined a single through the right side of the infield to lead off the sixth inning, and two batters later, Cash got to remove Snell more or less right where he wanted to — after 5.2 shutout innings and 19 batters faced. Snell finished with nine strikeouts for his troubles, a Rays playoff record, and his bullpen turned in a typically strong performance en route to securing a 3-1 victory. Top-seeded Tampa Bay can advance to the ALDS with a win in Game 2, which begins Wednesday at 4:07 p.m. Read the rest of this entry »

Game 1 of the American League’s Nos. 3/6 seed matchup between the Minnesota Twins and Houston Astros was a microcosm of what may define this year’s Wild Card round, one in which a three-game series can be swung by chaos and randomness. Lady Luck had a hand in Houston’s 4-1 win in Minnesota, especially in a defining three-run Houston ninth.

All four of Houston’s runs came after a series of tough-luck hits and poor Twins defensive execution. After pitching a clean sixth inning and beginning the seventh with a pair of outs, Twins reliever Tyler Duffey gave up a shift-beating single to Josh Reddick and an infield single to Martín Maldonado, who hit a ball that was too hot for Marwin Gonzalez to handle at third base despite coming off the bat at just 79 mph. They were followed by a George Springer single off a first-pitch breaking ball to score Reddick, but Maldonado was thrown out by 30 feet while making an ill-advised attempt to advance to third. That tied the game at one.

The ninth inning was the death blow. Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel reached into the left-handed batter’s box to poke a Sergio Romo slider into the outfield for a flare single, and Carlos Correa followed with a bloop hit of his own. Romo retired the next two hitters, bringing Springer to the plate in yet another big spot. He hit a weak one-hop liner to the left of shortstop Jorge Polanco that seemed likely to end the inning, but Polanco’s throw the short way to second base was off the bag and second baseman Luis Arraez was unable to handle it while holding the base, allowing Springer to reach and load the bases. None of the Houston baserunners put a ball in play in excess of 81 mph. Read the rest of this entry »