October (So Far)
Checking In on Baseball’s Postseason Before the World Series...
Well this has been a rough year to be a skeptic of the “Baseball’s Playoffs are a Crapshoot” narrative. This year’s World Series features two Wild Card teams — the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks — who combined for the fewest regular season wins of any World Series matchup in the history of baseball.
It’s not really the Rangers’ fault — they actually had the second-best run differential in the American League, and finished with the same record as the team that won their division, only losing the AL West to the Astros by virtue of a tiebreaker. But the Diamondbacks are the crapshootingest of crapshoot teams, finishing with only 84 wins and just barely stealing the last Wild Card in a weak National League. The Seattle Mariners won four more games than Arizona and didn’t even make the playoffs.
The Dbacks aren’t technically the worst team to make the World Series, and they wouldn’t even be the worst to win it: The Cardinals had only 83 wins in 2006… but they at least won their division and had a positive run differential, which is more than you can say for this Snakes team.
But it’s unfair to single out Arizona. The “crapshoot” narrative has been persistent all October. The five teams that won over 90 games this season — the Orioles, Rays, Braves, Brewers, and Dodgers — combined to win exactly one playoff game this year; in eight of the ten postseason series, the team that finished worse in the regular season won. If you were only paying attention to this year, it would seem like a total vindication of the Crapshoot Myth.
At the risk of seeming defensive, though, I want to remind people just how aberrational this year actually is. Although it seems like this is just how the playoffs always go now, that is simply not true. Before this year, the team with the best or second-best record* in the American League made the World Series every year but one going back to 2013. The National League has been a little flukier, but there too, in eight of the 12 seasons prior to 2021, one of the two best teams won the pennant. Even the exceptions are often not really teams that just happened to survive a “crapshoot” postseason,** so much as teams that were legitimately better than their record indicated, like those Giants teams that won three World Series without ever having the best regular season record in the National League.
*Just so you don’t think I’m cherry-picking with this “or second-best” framework, the teams that weren’t #1 overall were: a 95-win Astros team that had a +205 run differential in 2021; a 101-win Astros team in 2017; and a Cleveland team that finished just one game behind Texas in 2016. You can’t really accuse any of these teams of being “fluke” pennant-winners.
**I will again emphasize that the 2019 Nationals, who are often brought up as a “fluke” World Series winner and proof that the Crapshoot Myth is true, were actually a loaded team that just got off to a terrible start, but then played at a 107-win pace for over four months. Does it count as “getting hot” if it covers 80% of the season?
But most of the time, at least before this year, the regular season has been a very good predictor of postseason results! Most of the time, the better team wins; and the greater the difference between regular season records, the more likely a team is to win.
It’s important to be precise about this, I think, because as I wrote last year, while the Crapshoot Myth certainly feels true, it continues to cover up some different, deeper problems in the sport. To simply say, “Oh, baseball’s postseason is always random” is to ignore that this year really is different, and it’s worth exploring why.
It’s a small sample size, but the changes MLB made to the postseason last year seem to be having an effect. Adding a third Wild Card lowered the standard for entry into the postseason, and then there’s the rest question…
After the Division Series round, when the three best regular season teams all lost pretty badly, there was a whole round of hand-wringing about the question of rest in the postseason. Since baseball expanded the Wild Card round from one to three games, and gave byes to the top two division winners, they created a situation where the best teams now sit for at least five days after the season ends. As many people have pointed out, so much time off — in a game that is usually played every day — throws guys off their rhythm and potentially puts them at a disadvantage, even though the bye is theoretically supposed to be a reward. In eight series since this started, the team with extra rest lost five times, even though those teams are by definition the favorite.
While I’m sympathetic to these concerns, it strikes me as a little disingenuous for people to act like more rest is purely a bad thing. For most of my baseball-following life, fans have recognized that, while too much rest can cause slumps, added rest can also keep guys fresh and allow players to get healthy. And, crucially, in the postseason, additional rest allows you to set your rotation.
Ah, but there’s the rub. I think we have finally stumbled on the REAL issue here: Teams no longer care about setting up their rotation because of how bullpen usage has changed. Historically, the main advantage of rest in the postseason was that it allowed a team to line up their best starters to pitch the biggest games. Indeed, that was a main reason playing in the Wild Card round was initially supposed to be such a disadvantage — by having to use your ace in the Wild Card game, you couldn’t bring him back to start twice in the Division Series.
But now pitching staffs aren’t really built around an “ace” anymore — they are built around the bullpen. Look at this year’s Orioles. They won 101 games and allowed fewer runs per game than either ALCS team this year. But they didn’t really have an “ace”: Nobody on their team threw a complete game all year, and their best starter, Kyle Bradish, averaged under six innings per start. Indeed, Bradish started Game 1 and pitched pretty well, but he was pulled before the end of the fifth inning because teams now want to get to their bullpens as quickly as possible. As a result, it’s just not much of an advantage for Baltimore to line Bradish up for Game 1.*
*I’m not sure how much stock to put into this, but the only teams to win with the byes since 2022 were teams that DID have old-school aces they very much wanted to use in Game 1: the Astros had Justin Verlander last year and this year, while the 2022 Yankees relied on Gerrit Cole.
Conversely, the team that eliminated the Orioles — the World Series-bound Rangers — did have their rotation slightly foiled by having to play in the Wild Card round. In Game 1, they had to start Andrew Heaney, when they surely would have preferred to use Jordan Montgomery or Nathan Eovaldi or Max Scherzer. But the starter didn’t really matter — Heaney was pulled in the fourth inning, after facing just 14 batters, as Texas used six different pitchers to hold Baltimore to just 2 runs.
This has been the REAL story of the postseason — not the upsets but the bullpens. It’s telling, after all, that despite all these surprising outcomes, very few of the games have actually been competitive. Through the first 25 games of the postseason, there were only five lead changes IN TOTAL (hat tip to Joe Posnanski for figuring that out). The pattern in all those games was remarkably similar: One team would score early, and then the bullpen would shut down the opposing offense. Any team that faced an early deficit hardly had a chance. Through the Division Series, over 55% of total runs scored were scored before the 5th inning; only 20% were scored after the sixth (and most of these came in games that were already blowouts).
Things got a little more exciting in the League Championship Series, but the pattern still held: Scoring was down, and bullpens ran the show. The Diamondbacks, for example, have relied on just three relievers — Kevin Ginkel, Ryan Thompson, and Paul Sewald — to throw 25% of their total innings this postseason, giving up just three earned runs in that stretch. And you could say similar things about the Phillies, who relied on Jeff Hoffman, Jose Alvarado, and Matt Strahm to get to Game 7 of the NLCS.
The defining feature of baseball in 2023 is that bullpens are just too good. Look at those names again: Ginkel! Thompson! Hoffman! Strahm! These are not exactly household names. Many baseball fans probably never even heard of them before October. And yet they are absolutely shutting down these lineups.
The Diamondbacks’ bullpen wasn’t even especially good this season: Their bullpen ERA was below the league average! But every single team now has three or four guys you’ve never heard of who throw the nastiest pitches you’ve ever seen. And in October, you can just rely on those three or four guys over and over again. It’s no wonder that this is leading to seemingly random outcomes. Postseason games emphasize the aspect of the game where there is the least difference between teams.
Now, it is my belief that you could solve a lot of this just by getting rid of all the off days in October. It’s never made sense to me why MLB does this — baseball is an everyday sport, and building in so many off days mitigates the advantage of depth (plus, it leads to weird stretches like this week, when there was no baseball at all for two days). Things that make a good team good — like a rotation that can pitch deep into games, or a bullpen that goes deeper than three or four guys — are neutralized and almost irrelevant in the postseason.
And given the way the game has gone over the last few years, it has only gotten worse. The reason managers can comfortably pull a starter in the third or fourth inning is that teams are never asked to play more than three days in a row come October — it’s rare for them to even play more than twice in a row — so you never have to worry about burning through your bullpen.
But the bigger problem here is the proletarianization of the bullpen, which I have been covering for years now.
After all, the off days have been a problem for a while; the Wild Card teams have been there for decades now. These features are not new. What’s new is this complete deskilling of the pitching staff. There used to be a lot riding on who that day’s starting pitcher was, and who was available in the bullpen. And yet now pitchers are just interchangeable parts, all throwing nasty pitches for a couple innings a game, at maximum effort until their arms blow out and they are replaced by the next guy off the assembly line.
Of course the outcomes seem random when baseball has diminished the importance of skill. Yet this does not HAVE TO be true. Indeed, it is not even as true as it seems — the Crapshoot Myth was not really true prior to 2021, and the last few years might just be random variance. So we shouldn’t just throw are hands up and say, “Well, what can you do? After all, the playoffs are a crapshoot!” There are real problems here, and they can be fixed, if we’re willing to challenge the power of the people who benefit from those problems.