After the Detroit Tigers beat the Houston Astros in the opener of their Wild Card series, I wrote that while Tarik Skubal wasn’t perfect, he was very good, and that was enough to lead his team to a 3-1 win. The same was true in Game 2 of the ALDS, although this time he wasn’t the biggest story. On an afternoon where the ace left-hander hurled seven scoreless innings, Kerry Carpenter came off the bench and hit the biggest home run of his life against a lights-out closer. When the dust had settled, the Tigers had evened their series against the Cleveland Guardians at one game apiece with a 3-0 win.

The matchup between Skubal and Matthew Boyd offered both a contrast in styles and, at least on paper, a mismatch. After undergoing Tommy John surgery last year, the 33-year-old Boyd wasn’t offered a major league contract during the offseason, and he remained unsigned until June, when he signed a one-year deal with Cleveland for an undisclosed salary. He appeared in only eight big league games during the regular season. As it turned out, Boyd ended up matching this season’s likely American League Cy Young winner pitch-for-pitch for four-plus innings before the Guardians turned to what has been baseball’s best bullpen this season.

The early frames accentuated the contrast in styles. Through three innings, Boyd relied heavily on soft stuff, throwing more changeups than fastballs, while Skubal relied primarily on high-90s heaters, mostly leaving his own plus changeup in his back pocket. Hitters on both sides were left floundering. By the time the Guardians batted in the bottom of the fifth, the Tigers had the game’s only four hits, and one of them was of the infield-dribbler variety. Read the rest of this entry »

Hang it in the Louvre:

Oh, and this one too:

The playoffs were absolutely wild this weekend. Out of the six games played Saturday and Sunday, two were all-time classics. First, the Yankees and Royals traded blows before Alex Verdugo produced a game-winning single after a controversial stolen base call. Then the Phillies and Mets traded home runs and blown leads right up until the last play of the game, Nick Castellanos’s walk-off hit.

If you wanted to, you could read our game stories for these games, or any number of other fine pieces about them across the internet. You could watch highlights or condensed recaps. But this is FanGraphs, so I thought I’d cover another angle: where these games fit in the history of wild playoff games.

We have win probability charts going back to 2002, which means we have data on total win probability changes going back to that year as well. If you take the absolute value of these and sum them up, you can see exactly how much each team’s fortunes changed throughout the contest. The more total win probability changes, the wilder things are. For example, the least exciting game by this measure occurred on October 9, 2019. The Cardinals beat the Braves 13-1 in the NLDS, and they opened things up by scoring 10 in the first inning. No drama, and thus very few changes in win probability. A 2023 contest between the Diamondbacks and Dodgers (11-2 Arizona, 9-0 after two innings) is the runner up.
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I started writing this article just before the playoffs began, and I framed it to myself as a trailer for an early-2000s romantic comedy. I thought Matthew Boyd and the Cleveland Guardians fit the rom-com formula surprisingly well. After his second breakup with his ex (the Tigers), Boyd was hurt (recovering from Tommy John surgery), unemployed (a free agent), and short on suitors (unsigned well into the season). When he had his meet cute (signed a contract) with the Guardians, they were successful (best record in the AL) but something was missing (starting pitching). Sparks flew instantly. Boyd pitched to a 2.72 ERA in eight starts. Cleveland won six of those eight games.

Now, the Guardians are just a baseball team, standing in front of a Boyd, asking him to start in the ALDS. Replace Boyd with Kate Hudson and make him a journalist instead of a baseball player, and you’ve got your movie. About a Boyd. To All the Boyds I’ve Loved Before. You get it.

Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for the rest of you), my colleague Kiri Oler came out with an excellent piece not so long ago that just so happened to use a Kate Hudson rom-com as a framing device. I was delighted that two different writers thought to write about Kate Hudson on a website that usually couldn’t have any less to do with Kate Hudson, let alone the fact that we both thought to do it in the same week. At the same time, I was disappointed I’d spent so much time coming up with “Boyd” puns for nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Let’s just get this out of the way up top: Jazz Chisholm Jr. should have been called out at second base.

The replay review of his seventh-inning stolen base showed that his foot had not yet touched the bag when Royals second baseman Michael Massey applied the tag. Chisholm then scored the go-ahead run on Alex Verdugo’s single to left field, and the Yankees won a somewhat sloppy, back-and-forth Game 1 of the American League Division Series, 6-5, on Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.

“They just said there was nothing clear and convincing to overturn it,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said Sunday morning, after he asked MLB why the call on the field was not reversed. “If he had been called out, that call would have stood too.” Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone thought it was gone. Jurickson Profar hopped around, ostensibly upset that Mookie Betts’ fly ball had dropped into the left field seats. The camera panned to Betts triumphantly rounding the bases. The scorebug flipped from zero to one under the Dodgers logo. And then, a few seconds later, all was clear: Profar had pulled a Julio Rodríguez, fooling everyone into thinking it was a homer before whipping the ball back into the infield. He wasn’t hopping out of frustration, it turned out; on second look, he was engaging in some well-earned taunting, goading the assembled Dodgers fans after his excellent defensive play.

JURICKSON PROFAR ROBS MOOKIE!!! #NLDS pic.twitter.com/bvByqwsAKB

— MLB (@MLB) October 7, 2024

Profar’s first-inning home run robbery and subsequent gloating was a sign of things to come. In a tense clash between these two Southern California rivals, the Padres came out on top, 10-2, to level the NLDS at a game apiece, battling their opponents both on and off the field throughout the course of this bizarre evening.

The weirdness peaked in the seventh inning, when the game was delayed for over 10 minutes while fans threw things — including baseballs and beer cans — onto the field, pausing the action. While security guards attempted to get the crowd under control, Padres manager Mike Shildt gathered his fielders, issuing a fiery impromptu pep talk as the team huddled around their appointed leader. After the inning, an even larger group meeting was held in the Padres dugout, this time led by the on-the-field leader, Manny Machado, who issued marching orders to the rest of the San Diego roster. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a scene in The Way of the Gun where Ryan Phillippe’s character is torturing some dude — the details are unimportant but gruesome — and he’s leaning over his poor victim, describing all the horrible things he’s going to do if he doesn’t talk. One line has always stuck with me: “Whatever I do after that, I’ll pour gasoline in your eyes from time to time just to keep you from passing out.”

Baseball can be like this. You can check out of a blowout, but a failed comeback only makes defeat hurt worse. No hope isn’t as bad as false hope. Is your team showing signs of life, or are you about to get another splash of gasoline in your eyes?

Either the Mets or Phillies could’ve gotten the splash on Sunday, as Nick Castellanos and Mark Vientos, among others, traded clutch hits, and both teams watched their high-leverage relievers get torched. In the end, the Phillies bounced back one more time than the Mets, salvaging a home split with a 7-6 walk-off win in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. It was an instant classic in its own right, and a victory of immense import for a team that looked dead on its feet. Read the rest of this entry »

Three of the best handful of hitters on the planet were on the same field at Yankee Stadium yesterday, and the Phillies/Mets rivalry is as venomous as any in baseball, but take a straw poll of the real sickos and they’ll tell you the marquee Division Series tilt is the one between the Dodgers and Padres. It’s not only a bitter intradivisional matchup, it marks the MLB playoff debut of the Face of Baseball and features so many of the game’s stars that this paragraph would need to cup its hands together to carry all of their names. Game 1 absolutely delivered on the hype, as the teams traded haymakers every other inning for the first half of an incredibly tense contest before the Dodgers’ relievers snuffed out whatever embers of a rally the Padres could muster from the fifth inning on. Los Angeles won 7-5 to take a 1-0 lead in the best-of-five series. Read the rest of this entry »

Justyn-Henry Malloy was in the Atlanta Braves organization when he appeared as a guest on FanGraphs Audio in October 2022, this while finishing up his first full professional season in the Arizona Fall League. He became a Tiger soon thereafter. In early December of that year, Detroit acquired the now-24-year-old outfielder, along with Jake Higginbotham, in exchange for Joe Jiménez.

Then a promising-yet-unpolished 2021 sixth-round pick out of Georgia Tech, Malloy was described in our trade recap as possessing “a combination of power and patience.” It was the latter that stood out most. Plate discipline was the youngster’s carrying tool, as evidenced by a .438 OBP as a collegian and a .408 OBP across three levels in the minors. Despite a higher-than-ideal strikeout rate and questions about his defensive future — he’d recently transitioned to left field from the hot corner — Malloy seemed well positioned to join a young Tigers lineup in the coming seasons.

He arrived, at least in part, this summer. After doing his thing in Toledo — his stat line with the Triple-A Mud Hens this season included a .403 OBP and a 129 wRC+ — Malloy made his MLB debut in early June, and with the exception of brief demotion in late August remained on the roster throughout. His numbers were admittedly not great. In 230 plate appearances against big-league pitching he slashed just .203/.291/.366 with eight home runs. Moreover, a pedestrian 10% walk rate belied the discerning-eye approach that helped him get there.

How different is the present day Justin-Henry Malloy from the up-and-coming prospect I’d talked to two years ago? I asked him that question when the Tigers played in Chicago on the final weekend of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Alex Verdugo spent the last five months of the 2024 season dragging down the Yankees’ offense, so much so that in the season’s closing weeks, the team gave an abbreviated look to 21-year-old top prospect Jasson Domínguez. Not until late Friday night did word leak that manager Aaron Boone would stick with Verdugo to start the Division Series opener against the Royals, but the 28-year-old left fielder made the decision look brilliant. In a seesaw battle that included runs in every inning from the second through the seventh — creating five lead changes, a postseason first — Verdugo sparked a pair of two-run rallies with a third-inning single and sixth-inning walk, made a sparkling defensive play with a sliding catch to end the fourth, and drove in the decisive run in the seventh in the Yankees’ 6-5 win.

“He didn’t have his best season this year, but he’s gonna show you guys that this is his time,” said Jazz Chisholm Jr. “This is what he’s made for.”

During the regular season, Verdugo hit just .233/.291/.356 for an 83 wRC+, the ninth-lowest mark of any qualifier, and from May 1 on, he hit an even more dismal .225/.275/.336 for a 72 wRC+, the fourth-lowest of any qualifier. Nonetheless, Boone stuck with him through thick and thin, and the Yankees initially bypassed an opportunity to recall Domínguez — whose season included rehabbing from Tommy John surgery and then an oblique strain — when rosters expanded on September 1. They eventually called up Domínguez on September 9, and he started 15 of the team’s final 19 games, including eight out of the last 10 in left field while Verdugo sat.

But unlike last year, when he homered four times in eight games before tearing his right UCL, Domínguez scuffled at the plate (.179/.313/.304, 84 wRC+), leaving the door open for Verdugo. He was ready when Boone called his number, a decision that owed plenty to his familiarity with Yankee Stadium’s spacious left field and the way Domínguez, regularly a center fielder, struggled when shifted over to the less familiar position. “Obviously Alex has been tremendous for us out there defensively, and even though it’s been up and down for him in the second half, especially offensively, I still feel like there’s a really good hitter in there that can provide something for us at the bottom,” said Boone before Game 1. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — I suppose coming back from a 1-0 deficit is child’s play to a team that, last time out, overturned a 2-0 ninth-inning deficit against one of the best closers in the league. A team that clinched its playoff berth with a six-run eighth inning in Atlanta, coughed that lead up, then took it back for good an inning later. A team that, on August 28, was just five games over .500, with a 13.1% chance of making the playoffs.

And this was supposed to be a rebuilding year anyway. After beating the Phillies in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, 6-2, and weathering the best starting pitcher they’re going to see at least in this series, maybe for the rest of the postseason, the Mets now have a chance to go up 2-0 in enemy territory on Sunday. With two advancement-clinching wins already in the bag, and as many iconic victories over the team’s two most hated division rivals, this is the best week the Mets have had in… well, it’s been a while. Read the rest of this entry »