The Mets and Cardinals Should Try Pitching Gambits

There isn’t a lot to ponder for most teams when it comes to Wild Card starters. The Padres should start their best three starters. So should the Phillies, Guardians, Blue Jays, Mariners, and Padres. That leaves the Rays, Mets, and Cardinals as teams that have decisions to make, at least in my estimation. The Rays — well, let’s just say that if the Rays called up a sentient ham sandwich to start in the playoffs, we analysts would dig into Ham Sandwichson’s minor league numbers and try to figure out what they saw. There’s no predicting Tampa Bay. That just leaves the Mets and Cardinals.

New York Mets

Wait, the Mets? They have Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, backed by Chris Bassitt and Carlos Carrasco. They’ve already announced Scherzer for the first game; can’t they just run out deGrom and then Bassitt (or Carrasco) in case of a deciding game? Sure, they could. But they should — and probably will — get fancy by holding deGrom back, something I expect them to do should they win the first game of the series.

This doesn’t sound like a good plan offhand. Leave the best starter on the planet behind Bassitt, a man whose fastball can best be described as “adequate,” in a game where you could end the series with a win? That sounds too cute by half for a franchise eternally stepping on rakes.

The issue is that the winner of the Mets/Padres series gets the fearsome Dodgers in the NLDS. That’s a tough matchup, and it’s made even tougher by the new playoff structure, which lets the Dodgers set up their rotation as they please while their challengers burn their aces in a desperate struggle for survival. Should the Mets win two straight games using Scherzer and deGrom, they’ll likely run out a rotation of Carrasco, Scherzer, deGrom, Bassitt, and then Carrasco again. That’s a solid group, but only getting your mega-aces one start apiece is a raw deal against the best team in baseball. Hold deGrom out of Game 2 and sweep the Padres, though, and they could run out a deGrom-Scherzer-Bassitt-Carrasco-deGrom rotation. That’s 50% more starts by elite pitchers.

In years past, I’d simulate this difference by adjusting each team’s projections for which pitcher was starting, creating pitcher-aware, game-by-game team true talent estimations. From there, I’d forecast the series using the two prospective rotations. I did that again this year, too. I’ll warn you: our projections like the Mets a lot, perhaps too much. They make them a favorite over the Dodgers even with Carrasco starting twice instead of deGrom:

With deGrom starting Games 1 and 5, though, the odds really like the Mets:

This year, I have a new wrinkle — and by “I,” I mean Dan Szymborski. I asked Dan to run ZiPS game-by-game odds for the same series using those same rotations; I think ZiPS does a better job pegging team strength in this format than our Depth Charts-based odds, in that I think the Dodgers are better than the Mets overall. Here are the odds for the series assuming Carrasco starts the first game:

And here they are for deGrom starting the first game:

The upshot: starting deGrom twice adds four to five percentage points to the Mets’ chances of escaping Los Angeles with their playoff lives intact. But even if New York holds deGrom for Game 3 of the wild card round, there’s no guarantee it’ll sweep the Padres. I used ZiPS game-by-game odds to account for that: assuming the Mets win the series and only pitch deGrom in the third game (or the second game if they lose the first), they’ll have him available for two starts in about 49% of their potential series against the Dodgers.

In other words, if you believe my hacked-together Depth Charts odds, the Mets move from 51.9% favorites to 54% favorites by executing the deGrom gambit. If you want to use ZiPS instead, they move from 45.7% underdogs to 48.3% underdogs. Either way, that’s a meaningful improvement merely by flip-flopping your pitching assignments in a wild card series.

What could postponing deGrom cost them? In theory, not much. Bassitt and Carrasco are roughly equivalent pitchers, so running deGrom out in the second game against the Padres to try to close the door quickly doesn’t do much for the Mets’ pitching assignments against the Dodgers. If the Mets lose Bassitt’s start, so what? They run deGrom out the next day anyway, and if deGrom loses that one, tough luck. You can’t win a best-of-three series if you lose both Bassitt’s and deGrom’s starts, so the ordering doesn’t seem to matter much.

There are a few knock-on effects in a potential NLCS, but none worth worrying about. In a scenario where deGrom wins a deciding fifth game against the Dodgers, he won’t be available until Game 3 of the NLCS. Again: so what? If that world comes to pass, it means the Mets used deGrom in the highest-leverage spot available, and they’ll still get Scherzer for two starts in the next series. I think they’d live with that 100 times out of 100.

There are some other factors in play, ones it’s hard to estimate from the outside. Would the Mets bring Scherzer back on short rest if they reached Game Five against the Dodgers without deGrom available? Is that a better option than Carrasco on regular rest? Are they treating deGrom with kid gloves, aiming for extra days off to the point where they wouldn’t bring him back on regular rest anyway? I don’t know the answers to any of these, and they undoubtedly matter, but short of deGrom saying he’d prefer to pitch on Saturday regardless of Friday’s outcome, I’d try to save him for Sunday.

This strategy looks like a mostly free lunch to me, but it goes away if the Mets lose the first game of the series. In that scenario, both Bassitt and deGrom will be pitching against the Padres regardless; might as well run your best starter out first. The big risk is largely hypothetical; the Mets will feel pretty silly if they send Bassitt out for the second game of the series, lose that one, then lose the decider. To my eyes, that’s not a real risk, but I can already see the New York tabloid headlines if that happens: “deWrong Strategy,” “What the Buck?,” “ShowHalter: Mets Boss Blows Series”… the list goes on. Even counting tabloid risk, though, I think this is a must-pursue strategy for the team.

St. Louis Cardinals

The Cardinals have a much different problem than the Mets. Instead of figuring out how best to deploy two spectacular starters, they have a big pile of similar starters without much daylight between them. José Quintana, Jordan Montgomery, Miles Mikolas, and Adam Wainwright are all similarly skilled pitchers. Jack Flaherty might be better than any of them, but he’s thrown only 36 innings this year as he returns from injury. His stamina and command are both in question.

The Cardinals have announced Quintana as the Game 1 starter, followed by Mikolas. That’s fine; as I mentioned, they all seem fairly equivalent to me. Philadelphia’s best hitter, Bryce Harper, is a lefty, and so is Kyle Schwarber. But they have a pile of good right-handed hitters, too, and performed better against lefties than righties on the year. Some of that is down to Harper missing a chunk of time with injury, but some of it is also because Rhys Hoskins and J.T. Realmuto can really rake.

I don’t think this series lines up particularly well for the Cardinals, to be quite frank. A deep, balanced pitching staff served them well in the regular season, but it does them no good in a three-game series. Meanwhile, the Phillies had trouble filling out the back of their rotation, but they get to start Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, which goes a long way toward making the third starter matter less. Our playoff odds concur: they give the Cardinals a 44.2% chance of advancing, with ZiPS chiming in at 48.8%.

My plan: shake things up. The Phillies should, in theory, not care which starter they face. Their lineup hasn’t looked particularly different between lefties and righties. The last time they faced a lefty starter was on September 22, against Max Fried. Here’s that lineup:

Here’s their lineup from the next day, against Jake Odorizzi:

Not so different, really, especially when you consider that Nick Castellanos was on the IL but will now handle right field. Philadelphia is running a centerfield platoon and moving the middle of the order around slightly, but it’s mostly the same lineup. Playing handedness games won’t serve the Cardinals particularly well; if they could somehow get the “wrong” Phillies lineup into the game, they’d only gain a slight edge.

But hey, a slight edge is more of an edge than none at all. I don’t think Flaherty is stretched out for a full start, and his last outing of the season was a one-inning relief appearance. Why not announce him as the Game 1 starter in an opener role? When he’s on, he’s the best starter the Cardinals have, and in a short burst, I like his odds against the top of Philadelphia’s lineup as much as anyone.

Who should follow Flaherty? That’s for the Cardinals to decide. Quintana and Mikolas each pitched three innings on Monday, piggybacking each other to give them both a final regular-season tuneup. Either has enough rest to start Friday; which one would go would be entirely down to team preference, and it hardly matters since both are guaranteed a start in the series regardless of what happens in the first game.

The Phillies would have to construct their lineup against Flaherty knowing he’s likely an opener, but without knowing who would follow him. Until the Cardinals announced their starters, there was no particular reason to pick one over the other; it would merely be a guess. That leaves the Cardinals a 50% chance of the Phillies guessing wrong and putting in the “wrong” lineup against either Quintana or Mikolas, with a subpar choice in the outfield and their hitters stacked slightly differently than their preference.

Is that a huge edge? Not at all. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s no downside. Flaherty against the teeth of the Phillies’ lineup is a matchup the Cardinals will seek out in this series; they’re light on impact relievers and don’t have any true lefty specialists to bring to bear against Schwarber and Harper. By sending Flaherty in right out of the gate, the Cardinals can guarantee a preferred matchup, with the added benefit of potentially wrong-footing the Phillies with the next pitcher to enter.

If Oli Marmol wanted to get really cute, he could choose his follower based on the Philadelphia lineup, guaranteeing a wrong decision. I’m against this plan, though. I like the Flaherty-as-opener plan because it costs nothing: it’s a matchup the team wants anyway, St. Louis’ chosen starter can go through a normal gameday routine, and the other starter can prepare for Saturday as normal. But as soon as you ask both of your starters to be ready to counter Philadelphia’s lineup, you’re changing their normal plans. That strikes me as too much of a risk; it’s not like the Phillies are the 2021 Giants, loaded with platoon bats and pulling off wholesale line changes based on their opponent. A 50–50 chance at a small edge is a great deal if it costs nothing; a 100% chance at that small edge doesn’t sound so good if the cost is anything higher than zero.

Sadly, this plan isn’t going to happen. The Cardinals have already announced Quintana will start on Friday. It’s not a huge deal; I don’t think it would swing the odds of either team winning the series by a single percentage point. Still, teams should pick up small advantages wherever they can. That’s the job: the players work their butts off on the field, and the front office and coaching staff go all out to put the players in the best position to win. I’m not saying the Cardinals aren’t doing that; I just think they left one stone unturned in trying to give it their all.