#78 Threes are wild
The Dodgers take care of business, and everyone else goes to Game 3
The Opener
Eight(!!!) teams open their offseason in need of a new manager. That’s more than a quarter of the league. The Mets, who suffered one of the most disappointing slow-moving collapses in baseball’s history, and the Pirates, who missed the postseason for the 10th-straight season, however, are keeping their same skippers at the helm. The current managerial openings are: Braves, Angels, Giants, Twins, Nationals, Rangers, Rockies, Orioles. That many open spots and that many unemployed former managers creates the opportunity for rampant speculation. If you want to keep track of it all, Jon Becker has you covered with a Managerial Vacancy Matrix that represents a commitment to color coding that I wish I could relate to.
The Dodgers disposed of the Reds in this year’s only Wild Card series sweep. It wasn’t without the constant infuriating teetering bullpen feeling that has characterized much of the Dodgers’ season, but it was a sweep nonetheless. The Phillies, their Division Series foes, are not going to do that little with that many baserunners.
We’ve got three Game 3s on Thursday, with the first one (Tigers-Guardians) beginning at 3:08pm ET. Buckle up.
Hey, programming note: You may notice it’s not Wednesday. Or Friday. Now that postseason baseball is here, The Bandwagon is going to follow the cadence of the baseball. Right now, that means collecting thoughts about the absolute flood of important games as efficiently as we can. Eventually it might mean some distinct features and live videos.
So, during October, expect The Bandwagon to arrive several times per week as you’re used to, but not necessarily on a specific day. Like a good relief pitcher, we will be there when called for.
Let’s run through some playoff games.
Tigers at Guardians
Tuesday: Game 1
⚾ Listen, if Angel Martínez has the strange fortune to foul off a 100-mph Tarik Skubal pitch directly into a camera behind home plate, sending shattered glass onto the field, I’m going to need two things to happen: 1. Everyone to react with a little more shock and concern and 2. For whomever is responsible for said camera to RELEASE THE SHATTER FOOTAGE. –HK
⚾The pair of hits off Skubal that, along with a walk to José Ramírez, scored the first run for the Guardians traveled a combined five feet in the air according to Statcast.
That is some serious small ball Guardians shit.
The RBI by Gabriel Arias looked like this.
Martínez was initially out, but the call was overturned. Is there anything better than a playoff play at the plate?
(When Ramírez led off the bottom of the ninth by reaching third on an error I was briefly convinced the Guardians were going to dink and bloop their way into the World Series.) –HK
⚾I saved this skeet(?) while I was finishing the above blurb because I wanted to remember to say something about Skubal’s amped up velocity.
And then by the time I got to this blurb, Skubal had finished out the seventh inning by inducing a swinging strike on his 96th pitch of the game — at 101.2 mph.
In the regular season, Skubal’s fastball averaged 97.6 mph, a top ten percentile velocity. On Tuesday, after 195 innings in the regular season and across 107 pitches in 7.2 more innings, he averaged over 99 mph on the fastball while demonstrating a crazy level of dominance. –HK
Wednesday: Game 2
⚾Postseason Major-League Debut Alert: Twenty-three-year-old Chase DeLauter, one of the Guardians’ top prospects, made his big-league debut playing center field. Not only had he never played in the majors before this do-or-die postseason game, he hadn’t so much as taken a competitive at-bat in any level since July 11 because of a hamate injury, and he hadn’t played center since 2024 at Double-A.
It didn’t go great initially.
In advance of the game, I was perusing the oft-referenced MLB Network research packet, which of course made note of this.
But even though DeLauter is doing something that only three other people in human history have done, by the end of reading this section I was no longer thinking much about DeLauter as I was distracted by needing to know everything about Mark Kiger. Like, where is he now and does he want to do an interview with The Bandwagon?
⚾Let’s look at some reviews of this game from before the eighth inning:
I’m even going to dox myself and share some texts with Zach:
Through the first 16 innings of the series, the Guardians had one (1) extra base hit. Then in the bottom of the eighth, they strung together four, including two home runs to become just the third team in the three-game Wild Card era to stave off the sweep.
Padres at Cubs
Tuesday: Game 1
⚾When I saw clips of Matthew Boyd, whose grandfather was a Cubs fan, discussing the great honor of pitching Game 1 for the Cubs at Wrigley Field, well I knew I had opportunity on my hands — to find out how the esteemed professional transcribers who are on-hand for every playoff game press conference would dispassionately note audible displays of passion.
The exchange that generated the response I’m talking about starts about 9:27 here, I really encourage you to watch cause it’s pretty cool.
Oh man, chills, right? Sign me up for the Matthew Boyd fan club, we’ll make shirts that say “successful, professional athlete men cry,” or something like that, we’re still workshopping.
But also, how do you transcribe that?
Those parentheticals are a little funny. –HK
⚾ The Padres are a low-key weird home field advantage team. They reaped huge benefits from Petco Park’s pitcher-friendly dimensions when they signed Nick Pivetta, but they also don’t hit nearly as many homers as you’d expect given the bold names in the lineup. On the road, Pivetta is a good pitcher but not the ace who appears in San Diego, and two Cubs homers did them in. I’m going to count that as an analysis win for me. —ZC
Wednesday: Game 2
⚾ Here’s a factoid about the Wild Card series that I was a bit taken aback by, courtesy MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell: By taking this game, the Padres became “the first team to lose Game 1 on the road, then bounce back to win Game 2.” Gotta be honest, this mostly makes me question why we’re not still doing the one-game, sudden death wild card games. –ZC
⚾ Mason Miller + postseason adrenaline has been about as eye-popping as anyone could have expected. He threw a 104.5 mph pitch on the black to strike out Carson Kelly.
But you know what? He might not be the most important Padres reliever from this Game 2. Adrian Morejon is the type of reliever who every team wants in October. A one-time starter, Morejon finished among the most valuable relievers in baseball despite his lack of closer cache. In this game, he cruised through seven batters and turned what could have been a series of dice rolls into one smooth ride that, crucially, makes future bullpen dice rolls less dicey. –ZC
Red Sox at Yankees
Tuesday: Game 1
⚾ Jazz Chisholm Jr. did not start this game, nor did Ben Rice, as the Yankees took on dominant lefty Garrett Crochet. That means two of the team’s five best hitters — left-handed hitters, but still — were not in the lineup. Instead, Amed Rosario, Jose Caballero and Paul Goldschmidt played. Rosario and Caballero played second and third, the positions Chisholm plays, for the apparent reasons of individual small-sample success against Crochet (Rosario) and overall good splits against lefties (Caballero). It did not work.
When Chisholm eventually entered, it was as a defensive replacement whose at-bat was a full lineup away. It did not help Aaron Boone’s case that the Yankees had hit so poorly they wound up never facing a right-hander, but instead trying to scratch out runs against left-handed closer Aroldis Chapman. After the game, Chisholm was clearly perturbed about being left out, and his half-hearted response to press questions became a news cycle in its own right, as these things do in New York. The Aaron Boone discourse was instantly returned to its boiling point. Hold that thought for Game 2. –ZC
⚾Alex Bregman, who was 2-for-4 for Boston, became just the eighth player ever to appear in 100+ postseason games. His first 99 all came with the Houston Astros.
In general, playoff counting stats trigger my fun-fact cynicism since there’s just so many more games and rounds and teams these days than in eras past — not to mention I’m pretty sure the whole league made it in 2020 and then they played 162 rounds of postseason? Does that sound right? But actually, there is only one active player with more postseason games. @Zach, wanna guess who it is? –HK
