2021 Baseball Post-Season

[danfrank]

I pretty much knew that when McFarland walked Cody Bellinger that the game was over. Bellinger, the recent MVP, batted a pathetic .165 this season. The Dodgers have kept him in the lineup despite being consistently bad for what, his defense (which is undeniably great)? McFarland had to throw strikes there, but he didn’t. Chris Taylor is far from the greatest star on the Dodgers, but he’s been a dangerous clutch hitter. He proved that with an exclamation point last night.

So, the teams with the two best records in baseball will play each other in the third-to-last series of the year. It was in the stars.

The Giants won the season series 10-9. This is a great rivalry going back well over a century. They have never played in the postseason, which of course wasn’t possible until the wild card era. I’m going to have to remind myself to keep breathing.

Go Giants!!

[Sonic Youth]

All I have to add about last night's game is how striking the difference was between the Boston crowd and the LA crowd. The Fenway stands were wild! LA may as well have been watching a tennis match. Weird.

[Mister Tee]

The oddity of baseball: last night's teams had the exact same record, yet one of them won easily; tonight's were separated by 16 games, but played dead even, until...

Max Scherzer wasn't at his best -- he only lasted one out into the 5th, with a pitch count over 90 -- but his only run allowed came on a wild pitch in the top of the first. Ageless Adam Wainwright lasted longer, and yielded only 1 run on a Turner home run. The bullpens took over, and, though there were a lot of base runners, we entered the 9th inning tied 1-1. (The game was over 4 hours by then, rather remarkable for a 1-1 affair.)

Jansen flirted with giving up the lead -- with a runner on second, O'Neil blooped one to right that just landed foul, denying St. Louis a lead; O'Neil subsequently struck out to end the inning. This brought us to that awful, sudden-death situation the visiting team always dreads. Pitcher McFarland got the first two outs -- albeit on well-hit drives -- but then walked Bellinger, and surrendered the walk-off homer you could pretty much feel coming.

So, the Dodgers are spared the ignominy of going home in one after a 106-win season...but they had to fight pretty hard for it. I'm no fan of either team -- they've both won too damn often of late for my taste -- so I don't much care about the outcome.

Tomorrow, we drop the one-and-out and begin the Division series with the AL teams.

Something I just realized in the last 24 hours: over the past six seasons, every single division in baseball has claimed a championship -- AL Central 2015 (Royals), NL Central 2016 (Cubs), AL West 2017 (Astros), AL East 2018 (Red Sox), NL East 2019 (Nats), NL West 2020 (Dodgers). If you (like me) view the 2020 crown as less legit, fine: go back to 2014 for the Giants. It's the first time since the establishment of three-divisions-per-league that we've seen this -- I suspect it's exactly the kind of parity the lords of baseball have been looking for.

[Mister Tee]

Unlike Sonic, I was still with the game as long as it stayed 4-1 -- memories of the Fenway series just week before last, when the Yankees came back late twice, and the general gestalt of the team this year, allowed for the possibility of a stirring charge. Those last 2 runs -- courtesy of 2 of the walks Dan cited -- were the dagger in the heart (served up by Chad Green, who, as much of an asset as he's been through this entire run, has been responsible for all too many of the bullpen failures this season that limited the team to the Wild Card in the first place).

But, in retrospect, Judge being thrown out at the plate was the fulcrum of the game. Rizzo's Pesky-poler and Judge's single had just driven Eovaldi from the game, to the delight of fans -- Eovaldi has tormented the Yankees since 2018, and, honestly, no pitcher on the Sox roster scares me nearly as much. I thought it was a hasty decision Cora would live to regret. Stanton's ringing ball-off-the-wall should have been a rally builder (at a time when it was only 3-1), but Nevin made a ridiculous send -- from the replay, the (pretty lousy) throw had already reached the infield before Judge rounded third, yet Nevin was frantically waving him home, where he was out by plenty. (I know it sounds crazy to blame a third-base coach for anything, but the Yankees in fact led the league in runners out at the plate, so this isn't a one-time thing.) In any case, it took the air right out of the balloon, and made the game the one thing I thought the Yankees were incapable of: dull and, in the end, non-competitive.

Cole left the mound with a hamstring issue on September 7th. It wasn't enough to send him to the IL, but he never pitched the same afterward, and l'll bet anything we'll find out (now that it's over) that he's been playing through something since. His super-short outing increased the load on the bullpen, which was very costly -- the later runs came when relievers who'd have thrown one inning apiece in a typical Cole game tried to extend to 2.

In a way, the game post-Cole was like the entire season: attempting to recover from a mess of the team's own making. The slow April-June start weighed on them, and even often-inspiring play wasn't enough to dig them fully out of their hole. I'll remember much of the year fondly, for all the individually stirring games, and the revival at multiple moments when it seemed the season was hopeless. I'm also willing to allow there were many extraneous factors (injuries, COVID, the dead ball) this year that prevented the team from playing up to expectation. But the cold hard eye notes this is year five since the arrival of the Baby Bombers, and the team hasn't so much as played in a World Series, so there will be changes made, some no doubt heart-breaking.

I'm now reduced to rooting -- futilely, I'm sure -- for the White Sox, the only team left in the AL I can stand. As for the Red Sox -- I'll be very surprised if the Rays don't wipe the floor with them

[danfrank]

Sorry, Tee and Sonic. Not a good game to go out on. A few thoughts:

* The one opportunity to change the momentum of the game was in the top of the sixth when the Yankees had three hits in a row. Phil Nevin’s decision to give the green light to Aaron Judge on Stanton’s hit was typical of the kind of mistake players make when they’re too amped up about it being a playoff game and get overly aggressive. Nevin should have known better. The game pretty much ended right there.

* As is so often the case in postseason games, it came down to pitching. The Yankees gave up seven walks (I think four of those went on to score), the Sox none. Gerrit Cole seemed like the kind of pitcher you want in that game, but his struggles at the end of the season were apparently not a fluke.

* Stanton’s great game at the plate went to waste. I was looking forward to the Judge and Stanton show for at least a full series, but alas.

* Anthony Rizzo still doesn’t look right in a Yankees uniform.

[Sonic Youth]

The 7th inning has just ended, and as pollster and analyst Dave Wasserman says, "I've seen enough". I'm just going to pretend that Sunday evening's 1-0 victory was the Yankees final game of the season, because it was the most heart-stopping anxiety-producing game I had ever seen in my life, possibly of any sport. Had I died afterward, that would have been the perfect game to go out on. It was excruciating and intoxicating. Tonight isn't even exciting enough to be excruciating, so after last night why bother sitting through it all? Here's to next season....

[danfrank]

I wrote a long post on the Giants that got erased because apparently I had been signed out before I submitted it. I might try to reconstruct it later but, needless to say, this was an incredibly gratifying baseball season for this Giants fan and I’m pumped about the postseason.

Good luck with your Yankees tonight, Tee.

[gunnar]

I grew up a Detroit Tigers fan and still watch their games just about every chance that I get. The last few years haven't been great, but the Tigers have been through worse stretches. It was nice to see them competitive again this year and hopefully they can take another step forward next year and get into the playoffs. I'll probably watch some of the playoff games, though not with the same fervor that I would if the Tigers were involved.

[Okri]

I always enjoy these threads, despite my baseball ignorance. All I can contribute is that as with hockey, dunking on Toronto will remain a hobby for Canadians far and wide. Except of course when we desperately want them to win.

It's complicated.

[Mister Tee]

I don’t know if it’s hangover from last year’s sort-of season, or a result of the ongoing COVID-is-still-with-us situation, but it was a pretty wild year for baseball. Most of the teams we expected to compete did qualify for the post-season in the end, but they got there by often circuitous routes. And many weird things happened along the way. My Yankees had a 13-game win streak and a 7-game losing streak within the same 30 days. That win streak was left in the dust by the Cardinals, who won a startling 17 in a row – going from not even in the rear-view for the Wild Card September 1st to winning it by a mile. The Mets, unprecedentedly, led their division for 103 days, and then ended up sub-.500, 10 full games out. Superstars were lost to serious injury (the aforementioned Mets’ Jacob deGrom, the Braves Ronald Acuna Jr., three-time MVP Mike Trout). Multiple teams lost up to half their rosters for 10-day stretches to positive COVID tests. The high home run trend of recent seasons came crashing down, replaced by its near-opposite: mid-June, offense was so far down, in the words of one writer, the average MLB pitcher was Dwight Gooden 1984. And, oh yeah: Shohei Ohtani had an all-star-from-both-sides season that earned him comparison to Babe Ruth. It was an often frustrating season -– deeply disappointing, for some (like San Diego, or Toronto) who held October dreams deep into the season but fell short in the end. But it certainly didn’t lack for entertainment.

So…here we are, with the post-season imminent. The cast of characters, starting with the NL:

A Cubs fan friend took me to a Mets/Cubs game in June. At the time, Chicago was neck and neck with the Brewers for NL Central supremacy (in fact, the Cubs led after their win that night). But the team subsequently went into a 9-in-a-row losing tailspin, and, to the shock of many (me included), the front office decided, okay, that era’s over, and quickly dealt away most of the stars from the beloved 2016 champions. This left a clear lane for the Brewers, who coasted to the division title with more ease than any other team in the league. Looking over their roster, it’s hard to figure how they won so comfortably -– no one seems to have had an outstanding year -– but maybe we’ll get a better look at them in the coming weeks. Or maybe not: we’ve seen this team several times in recent playoffs; till now, they’ve never lasted long enough for us to really get to know them.

The Braves, despite losing Acuna Jr., seemed the clear class of the NL East, and their run differential all year suggested a team that ought to be running away with it (they ran 6-8 games under their expected win total all summer). For whatever reason, they couldn’t seem to rack up wins the way they needed, and, as noted, the Mets held first place a long time, with the Phillies close behind. (Neither, it must be said, with particularly impressive records. The NL East is for its teams what the Electoral College is for Republicans –- you can win without being all that strong.) But, in the end, the deserving team ended up winning, though with an unimpressive 88 victories, worst of all post-season qualifiers. Now we’ll see if they can improve their post-season success quotient.

The best race in the NL was, in some senses, not a race at all, in that both teams seemed certain, by mid-to-late summer, to make the playoffs. The defending (with an asterisk) champion Dodgers brought back all their stars, and further glutted themselves by picking up Trea Turner, Max Scherzer and Trevor Bauer (that last didn’t end up so well). It was assumed by most they’d run away with the division. But something surprising happened -– something danfrank, I assume, will be happy to tell us more about. The Giants ran out to an early lead in the division, and just stayed there. Sports pundits spent much of August and September waiting for the inevitable crash -– the Giants, clearly, were playing over their heads, and the Dodgers underperforming a bit; surely, that would be straightened out sooner or later. (The run differential, in fact, says the Dodgers should have finished about 6 games ahead.) But it never happened. Here we’re to the end, the Dodgers won a franchise-record 106 games -– but that’s one behind the Giants’ 107.

Meaning the Dodgers will have a do-or-die face-off with the Cardinals in the Wild Card game -– those streaking Cardinals, who won 16 fewer games (even at that –- stop me if you’ve heard this one -- over-performing their run differential by 5 games; Pythagoras overall had a pretty lousy season). And, should the Dodgers get by them, they’ll immediately face off with these same Giants in the 5-game NLDS. Which feels a bit like scheduling the best actor award in the first half-hour of the Oscars, but that’s how it’s going to go this year.

Over in the AL, the White Sox had the easiest job, using their fine pitching staff and young hitting stars to run away with the Central crown. There’s some question how they’d compete in a tougher division –- the league’s top contenders (Rays, Astros, Yankees, Red Sox) beat them pretty soundly –- but 19 games each with a quartet of .500 or lower teams proved easy pickings, and the Sox will meet the Astros in their half of the ALDS.

Those Astros also somewhat under-achieved -- run differential says they should have tied the Rays for the league’s best record, instead of running five wins behind. But they once again won the division with relative ease, despite some challenge from the A’s and the startling Mariners (also despite being roundly booed at most road stadiums, tribute to their largely unpunished cheating scandal).

(What follows will be more Yankee-heavy than most would find necessary; I view it as thread owner’s prerogative to discuss what he chooses.)

A lot of the season’s activity came in the A.L. East, where my Yankees – at worst co-favorites pre-season -- got off to a terrible start: Luke Voit and Aaron Hicks essentially gone from day one, Clint Frazier’s promising 2020 turning out a mirage, the vaunted bullpen losing man after man to injury (with survivors enduring horrific mound meltdowns), and several recent all-stars –- notably DJ LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres –- suffering deeply from the offensive droop. The team never quite collapsed, but, after a massive June funk, they stood at .500 on July 4th. This opened up the division for some unexpected contenders. The Red Sox, under .500 in the short COVID season and an 84-win team in 2019, blasted off and held the division lead by mid-season. The young Toronto Blue Jays, despite bullpen problems from the start, made their presence known with a ferocious offense led by Vlad Guerrero Jr. And, inevitably, the Rays, who lost another star pitcher (Blake Snell), but somehow plodded along in their methodical, analytics-driven way to win after win. (They remind me a bit of this Matt Amodio guy on Jeopardy –- they don’t make the game very exciting, but they’ve found a way to win pretty consistently.)

But that was only the start of the story. After their Independence Day nadir, the Yankees -- despite suffering 3 or 4 absolutely gut-crushing losses, including in the highly-hyped Field of Dreams game -- went on a 36-11 streak, highlighted by those 13-straight wins; they rocketed past the Jays and Red Sox (the latter, discovering gravity still applied, dropping out of first place for good), and got within sniffing distance of the Rays. At which point...the magic wore off as quickly as it had appeared, and the team sank into an early September death-spiral -– letting the Red Sox and Jays once again overtake them. (The Rays, by now, had clinched the division.)

With about ten days left in the season, the Yankees, Sox and Jays were all scraping for the two Wild Card spots, along with the A’s and Mariners over in the West. (Special note should be taken of the Mariners, who were Pythagoras’ biggest mystery this year, winning an almost unthinkable 14 games more than their run differential predicted. Pair that with the Blue Jays, who won 8 games fewer than projected, and two teams that all stats placed 20 games apart ended up within just one.) The Yankees appeared to have the toughest schedule, facing the Sox/Jays/Rays in succession -- but it turned out the best opportunity, as they swept the Sox in Fenway, took 2-of-3 in Toronto, and, after enduring two grueling losses to the Rays, fought to an exhilarating 1-0 walk-off yesterday to nail their spot. (Boston, sweeping the now-pathetic Nats, will host the Wild Card game.)

Gun to head, I’d say I think the Yankees are a better team right now than the Sox –- their bullpen is finally straightened out, and considerably superior –- but I know better than to predict the outcome of a single game. Especially with this Yankee team, which has had as close to a bi-polar season as I’ve ever seen. They’ve been capable of the highest highs and the lowest lows, sometimes in the same game -- as in the Field of Dreams match, where two unlikely 9th inning 2-run homers set up a miraculous win, only to see it offset by a bullpen crash that allowed a walk-off 2-run shot. (A friend texted me "From the best win of the season to the worst loss, inside 5 minutes") And how did the team react to this devastating defeat? The very next game, they set off on their 13-game win streak. So, honestly, I can expect anything from glory to catastrophe from this team; the only thing that would surprise me would be dullness or mediocrity.

So, that’s the starting point for the post-season – this time, with fans and everything (carefully checked for vaccination). More reports as the weeks progress, or as the spirit moves me. Hope everyone finds something to enjoy.