Postseason Manager Report Card: Walt Weiss
After a nine-year hiatus from managing, which he mostly spent with the Braves as Brian Snitker’s bench coach, Walt Weiss made a triumphant return to the top step of the dugout this year. Promoted to replace the retiring Snitker, Weiss made the playoffs for the first time as a big league skipper, winning 94 games, the NL East crown, and the Wild Card Series against the Phillies. With his season completed, following a 3-1 NLDS loss to the Dodgers, I’m making a trip to the grade book for the last time this year to evaluate his performance at the helm.
I’ll remind for you, as Ben Clemens also has for his AL manager report cards, that I care about process and not results here. It’s easy to say, “That was a great move because it worked,” or “That was a bad move because it failed,” but managers obviously can’t know the results of their decisions as they’re making them. I’ve tried my best to transport myself back to the moment of each decision — taking into account the pitches, innings, and plate appearances that led up to it — while ignoring its outcome.
Before we get into the grades, I’ll also reiterate that while these are ostensibly manager report cards, there’s a much larger group of people behind the skipper that helps to inform his decisions. Before the game, that includes discussions with the front office, which provides the reams of data that every manager has at his disposal during play. During the game, he’s getting feedback from his coaching staff and players on their levels of health and readiness. It really does take a village to get through a baseball game, and realistically, the praise and scorn doesn’t belong to the manager alone.
Jon Becker manages RosterResource's team payroll pages, assists with all other aspects of RosterResource, and also dabbles in creating new features as a Junior Developer. Follow him at your own peril: @jonbecker_ on Twitter and @becker.fangraphs.com on Bluesky.
Great writeup!
I’m still not 100% convinced that the Braves saw it as trading a Sale NLDS start for 4 outs against the Phillies. I think it’s possible that two Sale NLDS starts was never on the table, which is why they felt comfortable being aggressive with him against the Phillies.
We all assumed that the Braves were giving him extra days all year to keep him fresh to push him in the playoffs, but I think it was more than that. He’s just not a great pitcher on 4 days of rest. Since the beginning of 2025 Sale has a 3.88 ERA on 4 days of rest compared to a 1.99 ERA on 5+ days. That includes a blowup game in April of this year, but even just looking at last year it’s 3.29 vs. 2.03. Two NLDS starts would have required Sale to go on 4 days rest both times.
The Braves may have determined that they would be better off with one 2 ERA Sale start than two 3-4 ERA Sale starts since they could probably replicate the latter with their strong bullpen.
I am a Braves fan so this is probably just cope
I’m totally with you that pushing for the second start in the NLDS wasn’t necessarily the loss for the Braves by putting Sale in in relief, since that may never have been in the cards and/or would’ve provided a greatly diminished version of himself. But bringing Sale into that game — at the VERY START of what they would’ve hoped would’ve been a deep postseason run — and using him not just for a single inning but for an up-and-down, which makes it a lot less like a bullpen, was risking getting the diminished version of Sale going forward anyway, without even getting that much value to boot (Braves had a 98.8% chance of winning per ESPN at the point Sale came into the game). And that looks like what they got in the NLDS — a fair number of strikeout, but a TON of hard-hit balls, including 2 homers, in a fairly short outing.
yeah, I don’t think you can say “they wanted him to start on 5 days rest” and just assume that him coming in in relief would have no effect on that. If you think he needs extra rest to be effective, the last thing you should be doing is having him do the opposite of rest in the middle of that time period. (I know that it’s his throw day, but it’s really not the same thing.)
It doesn’t change the fact that pitching Sale was a win-the-wild-card move, not a win-the-World-Series move, but to me I have to wonder if Sale would still have been pushed to game 3 regardless. The only difference is that he’d be pitching game 3 on what has become his accustomed rest (5-6 days) instead of 4-days rest from his relief outing. Sale wasn’t himself and the bullpen outing could have been why.
Weiss refusing to mostly employ Murphy at Catcher and Baldwin at DH was a mistake, too. Murphy is a far better defensive player, and without an actual plus DH option, nobody else moves the needle much. Heck, Weiss even DH’d Murphy, which makes zero sense.
Great article! I have one question about the “overexposure” piece:
> I haven’t harped on overexposure too much in my report cards yet, but using Lee on back-to-back days against those two lefties qualifies as that to me.
Is having the same pitcher against the same batters on back-to-back days really overexposure? At the time, the Braves were ahead in Game 2 and looking to avoid Game 3 by using the best arms, so it’s not as if this was going to have a downstream effect later in a long series. Or if they had seen Lee in a bunch of games before this.
I think if you have the chance to close a series out you go with your best pitchers. I don’t think anyone would have expected them to avoid using Iglesias against the same hitters in Game 2 that he saw in Game 1. And the Braves clearly viewed Dylan Lee as their best setup reliever, especially against lefties.
On the other hand, if you want to make an overexposure argument, you could probably stretch the timeframe a little further. Lee got pitched against the Phillies 3 times in September, ~3 weeks before the playoff series, and faced Harper every time and Schwarber twice. And they had 3 hits off him in those appearances. But while Dodd only faced them once, he gave up a home run to Schwarber so I’m not sure they trusted Dodd in that situation either.
Love the writeup! Just wanted to add a few of my own observations, as a Dodgers fan, noting the moves that I was most grateful for in real time, which inherently means that Weiss should likely be docked for them:
1) Bringing Sale into Game 5 of the Wild Card Series: Speaks for itself, as you already have. Only Stephen Vogt’s bullpen management rivals this for “worst managing of the playoffs.”
2) Bringing Fuentes into Game 4 of the NLDS: Going into the series, there was no one I was more convinced the Dodgers weren’t going to be able to do much with than Fuentes, and that sure looked right after Game 2. Leaving Fuentes in for 3.2 IP/47 pitches was totally defensible, as you make the case for above. BUT….my silver lining at the time was that it essentially either made him unavailable until Game 5 (having pitched a practical starter’s workload, especially given the high stress of postseason pitches), and even then on a much more abbreviated outing, or else laid a trap where the Braves would be too tempted and/or unable to hold off on using him until then, which would make him vulnerable. Weiss fell prey to the latter trap, bringing him back on what was clearly short rest, and, with his velocity down and control shot, he essentially walked the Dodgers into position to win the game and clinch the series.
3) Pinch-hitting Lane Thomas for Yastrzemski in Game 4 of the NLDS: Just to set the scene, it was a 1-1 ballgame, bottom six, runner on second, and Alex Vesia had faced three hitters: Matt Olson (who hit a 107.8-mph one-hop shot right at the second baseman to end the previous inning, stranding two runners), Ozzie Albies (who hit a double off the wall Statcast says would’ve been gone in all 29 major-league ballparks that the game *wasn’t* played at), and Drake Baldwin (who hit an opposite field lineout that certainly could’ve been a single if it hadn’t been hit so close to where Teoscar was positioned in left). Pretty clearly, Vesia did NOT have his best stuff. Edgardo Henriquez is already warm in the ‘pen. Yaz is coming to the plate with righty Dubon on deck, so one would certainly imagine this is Vesia’s last batter.
I understand Yaz has non-minimal splits (17 points of wRC+ this season, 38 points for his career, with most of that difference being that he’s not as good against righties anymore. But Lane Thomas has even bigger splits (51 points this season, 49 points for his career). Yaz against a generic lefty (76 wRC+ in 2026) seems like the better choice than Thomas against a righty (74 wRC+), even if you reduce the task to “just get a single to drive the runner in from second (Yaz .210 batting average against lefties in 2026, Thomas .195 against righties). And that isn’t even getting into the chances that a new leverage reliever coming into the game won’t be better than the current one who is really struggling.
Anyway, you’ve hardly ever seen someone bounce out of the dugout so fast as Roberts, clearly relieved as hell that Weiss just made his job a whole lot easier, and you can’t help but think that Weiss maybe either forgot to check to see what was going on in the ‘pen or that Vesia had already faced the minimum three hitters, or else just that the opposing manager is allowed to respond to the moves you make, because this one seemed like he forgot that he wasn’t going to get the matchup he wanted, and, in the meantime, saved the Dodgers’ butts by letting them remove their struggling reliever (who’d gotten extraordinarily lucky in the three batters he faced not to have surrendered the lead to all three batters).
I mean, you sure are taking some latitudes in that framing. How about the alternative? Vesia had just faced two lefties, the Braves best two left handed hitters this year, who don’t have bad splits, and he retired both of them. Then a guy who stinks against lefties was coming up. At the very least, you get who you view as a higher leverage guy out of the game.
But honestly just looking at the “results” of three at bats (two outs) and declaring a guy doesn’t have it is a little presumptuous. Maybe you’re right, but at the very least you sure are bending this narrative to its breaking point to try to make your case.
Well, I’d also say I was basing it on having seen every pitch Vesia has thrown in the major leagues since 2021, and that his fastball wasn’t looking great and had terrible command within the zone, and he wasn’t landing the change, but I thought my subjective evaluation would be less compelling than looking at the results (how well every ball against him was struck, not whether they led to outs).
I’d also say that the thing that can go wrong with Vesia from a “hittability” perspective (as opposed to loss of command) is that, if he’s just a tiny bit off on his foundational four-seam fastball (which is notably slow but normally quite tough to square up due to IVB and arm angle), he starts getting crushed, while his performance from this game with the four-seamer was: 5 four-seamers thrown (all in the zone), 3 put in play in a threatening way, 2 fouled off, 0 swing-throughs or taken pitches.
But, even if you want to say Vesia WAS doing fine, I still don’t think this is the right choice. You say that they “g[o]t who you view as a higher leverage guy out of the game,” but Vesia was coming out of the game before the next batter (Dubon, who was going to bat that inning unless Yaz/Thomas lined into a double play to get Albies off second) anyway (so it didn’t really force the Dodgers to blow ALL their relievers earlier, just in case they were playing to win in extra innings), and — while I can’t vouch for who *the Braves* view as a higher-leverage reliever between Vesia and Henriquez, I don’t think most people (including the Dodgers, based on how they’ve lined up relievers throughout the year) would have a strong preference between the two.
In fact, I think this is again asking the question of who you’d rather face: Alex Vesia, facing his fourth batter, *following an up-and-down,* or Henriquez coming in fresh, given that your batter either way will not have a platoon advantage and has a wRC+ in the low 70s in such situations this year. Again, I’d take my chances against the guy at the outer limits of what you can ask him to throw instead of the fresh arm.
The only counterargument I can see for Thomas is if there’s swing-plane data to suggest he has a much better shot of hitting Henriquez than Yaz does against Vesia, which…..seems totally plausible. Might be true. I can imagine that. But I don’t have access to that data, and I don’t think it’s obvious, either, that it’s true. So, absent that, I just don’t think it was a very well-reasoned pinch hitting decision.