The Schwarbinator’s sixth inning bomb in NLCS Game One dropped Bryce Harper’s jaw and every jaw in Petco Park Tuesday night.

Reality check time. The Guardians’ overall small-ball offense abandoned them in Game Five of the American League division series they squandered to the Yankees. (I’ll mention the squander further in due course.) And the Yankees won the best-of-five in five because their slugging superiority won out in the end.

Sure, enough stellar pitching helped big enough. Guards manager Terry Francona’s reluctance to start ace Shane Bieber in Game Five probably did almost much as his batters’ inability to solve Cortes or a pair of early Yankee bombs to cost them the season.

Now, take a look very carefully.

For the peck-and-poke Guards, 5 percent of their ALDS plate appearances ended with extra base hits and 2 percent ended with home runs. For the bump-and-thump Yankees, 6 percent of their ALDS plate appearances ended with extra base hits and five percent ended with home runs.

On the regular season, six percent of Guardian plate appearances ended with extra base hits and two percent ended with home runs. Eight percent of Yankee plate appearances ended with extra base hits and four percent ended with home runs. (Aaron Judge’s AL record-setting 62 accounted for one percent of the latter.)

Neither team relied upon or got the long ball that much in the division series, but getting just a little bit more of it made as big a difference for the Yankees as getting top of the line pitching from Gerrit Cole in Game Four and Nestor Cortes in Game Give. Getting just a little bit less of it left the Guardians vulnerable whether facing Cole, Cortes, or a sore-armed snowball thrower.

Even as the ALDS was ending the National League Championship Series between the Phillies and the Padres opened with a 2-0 Phillies win. Zack Wheeler outdueled Yu Darvish on the mound by a hair, and Darvish surrendered both Phillie runs—on solo home runs by Bryce Harper (in the top of the fourth) and Kyle Schwarber (a mammoth 488-foot blast leading off the top of the sixth)—while the teams’ pitching otherwise kept each other to four measly hits, three for the Phillies and one for the Padres.

Much as they struggled through an early-season slump, injuries, and a mid-season remake, the Phillies ended eight percent of their regular-season plate appearances with extra base hits and ten percent of their National League division series-winning plate appearances with them. They also ended three percent of those NLDS plate appearances in homers and three percent of their regular-season plate appearances likewise.

The Padres—likewise riddled by injuries and a mid-season remake, not to mention losing Fernando Tatis, Jr. to injury and then a suspension for actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances—ended seven percent of their regular-season plate appearances with extra base hits and two percent with home runs. Six percent of their NLDS-winning plate appearances against the Dodgers ended in extra base hits; two percent in home runs. The Dodgers? Ten percent of their NLDS plate appearances ended with extra base hits but two percent likewise ended with home runs.

I was led to look at those percentages after reading a splendid Baseball Reference analysis by Russell A. Carleton, “Too Reliant on the Long Ball?” Examining 1995-2021, Carleton determined that the postseason team with the higher home run percentage won 54 percent of their games and the one with the higher home runs-to-runs scored ratio won 51 percent of the time. “It doesn’t appear that power teams are in any danger in the playoffs,” he writes, “and might even be a little better off.”

In other words, Carleton would like one and all to know or to re-learn, seemingly, we can one and all knock it the hell off with our home run hypocrisies. You know: we hate the presumption of home run prevalence except when our teams detonate them, just as we hate the presumption of strikeout prevalence except when our teams’ pitchers strike the hell out of the other guys.

The moral of the story is that home runs are a perfectly reasonable way to power an offense. They are no better or worse than any other approach at winning playoff games. I’m sure there’s some element of “feast or famine,” but usually when people say that, they forget about the fact that while there will be famine, there will also be feast.

By the way, during the regular season eight percent of the Astros’ plate appearances ended with extra base hits and three percent ended with home runs. Seven percent of their plate appearances while sweeping the Mariners out of their ALDS ended with extra base hits and four percent ended in home runs. That’s slightly less than the Yankee percentages when all is totaled out. But only slightly.

Meanwhile, you might care to note that a measly seven percent of all major league plate appearances on the regular season ended with extra base hits and three percent ended with home runs. Care to know what the Show average was? Seven percent, extra base hits; three percent, home runs. Too.

“So once again,” Carleton writes, “if you hear someone trying to scare you because a team doesn’t play small ball in the playoffs, and that they are too reliant on home runs for their offense, you can tell them with confidence that it doesn’t actually make a difference. There’s nothing wrong with hitting home runs. It’s generally a good thing.”

It certainly was for the Yankees making way to the ALCS at last. It certainly was for the Phillies drawing first blood in their NLCS. Play all the small ball you want, I’m all for it, except for those out-wasting, scoring-probability-wasting sacrifice bunts. You can win small. Just not every time out.

Don’t fool yourselves that small ball-heavy teams don’t need slugging percentage personnel to, you know, get more of the runs home than a small ball-alone team in the long run. Or, the postseason short run. The Yankees had three (Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Anthony Rizzo) with 30+ bombs on the season and prevailed. The Guardians only two who hit even 20+ bombs on the season and lost. Hardly the sole reasons, of course. But the difference helped make a difference.

Unless they’ve got Coles, Corteses, Wheelers, Darvishes, Nolas, Snells, Verlanders, Dominguezes, Haders, and Holmeses on the mound, the small ball-alone or small ball-mostly teams play with at least single hands tied behind their backs.