Category Archives: Baseball

Approaching the League Championship Series

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Houston Astros

The Astros are playing for a piece of history as well as a pennant.

Welcome back to Year Two of Commissioner Pepperwinkle’s postseason format. Brought to you by Jack. The makers of Diddley, America’s number one squat.

In the first episode, act one, three out of six regular season division winners got wild card round byes. The other three had to play wild card teams in round one. Two swept, one got swept, and one other wild card team swept the other one. Those sets played almost faster than the speed of sound, light, and the Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote.

Episode one, act two: Two division winners got swept, two more lost in four games. Those sets didn’t quite go beep! beep! but they were played swiftly enough when you look back upon them. And the net result was that the winning teams, collectively, went 20-2. Or, one loss fewer than former major league pitcher David Cone’s 1988 won-lost record.

We pause now for a brief commercial. A lot more brief than the ones which have been, really, the number one culprit in turning baseball games into marathon runs that tried the patience of even those lifetime romantics to whom the lack of a time clock has been one of baseball’s most endearing faculties.

This pause is brought to you by Schtick Razor Blades. No matter how you slice it, Schtick is just too sharp for comfort. Four out of five dermatologists tell you Schtick is several cuts below . . . the surface, and anything else it can reach. Remember, four out of five surveys have been doctored.

Episode two, stage right, begins Sunday night in Houston. Where the numbers one and two finishers in the American League West square off in a contest for not just the American League pennant but Texas bragging rights. Episode two, stage left, begins Monday night in Philadelphia. It’s only a contest for the National League pennant. There’s no intra-division, never mind in-state rivalry at stake there.

What we do have, however, is baseball’s sixth-best regular season team (the Astros) playing its eight-best regular season team (the Rangers) for that American League pennant and that Texas throne. We also have baseball’s seventh-best regular season team (the Phillies) playing its twelfth-best team (the Diamondbacks) for that National League pennant and, maybe, highlight film rights plus a year’s immunity from the sting of the Arizona bark scorpion.

Sunday night, the Astros open at home defiant of the conspiracy theory that the five-day layoff for the bye teams was a killer. They got the same five days off as the Dodgers and the Braves did and they beat the Twins in their division series, 3-1, outscoring the Twins 20-13. They also out-pitched the Twins, 3.25 team ERA to 4.89, with 52 pitching strikeouts to 37.

They weren’t quite as good at avoiding pitching walks as the Twins (16 for the Astros, 9 for the Twins), but they didn’t have to be in the end. The Astros hit for a team .818 OPS to the Twins’s .681. They may not find the Rangers to be ALCS pushovers, either: the Rangers led the American League regular season in hits, runs, home runs, and OPS. The Astros’s formidable pitching might have a war on its hands. But both teams were almost dead even for team fielding-independent pitching: 4.32 for the Rangers, 4.31 for the Astros.

This Texas war has the potential to make the Alamo resemble a ranch barbeque. Especially when each team’s most formidable postseason batter, Rangers shortstop Corey Seager (you know, the guy the Dodgers allowed to escape into free agency) and Astros left fielder Yordan Alvarez, checks in and starts doing damage. When this ALCS ends, Texas will be singing either “Corey, Corey Seager, king of the wild frontier” or “Yordan fit the battle of Jericho.”

The Astros—please, let’s knock it off about Astrogate at last, if only because a) second baseman José Altuve was indeed what his former teammate Carlos Correa said, “the one guy who didn’t use the trash can” and objected loudly when it was used during his plate appearances; and, b) Altuve and third baseman Alex Bregman are the only two remaining position players from the 2017-18 Astrogate teams.

But the Astros are playing for a piece of baseball history. If they turn the Rangers aside, then go on to win the World Series against either the Phillies or the Astros, they’d be the first repeat Series champions since the 1978 Yankees. If they meet and do it to the Phillies, they’d also be the first since 1978 to do it to the guys they beat the year before.

The Rangers are playing their first ALCS since winning back-to-backs in 2010-2011 . . . but losing both those World Series, especially to that staggering Cardinals overthrow in Games Six and Seven in 2011. (David Freese, call your office!) They haven’t even smelled the postseason since losing a division series to the Blue Jays in 2016, never mind gotten far enough to play for the pennant.

So the War for Texas involves one team playing for history and another time trying to augment its own on the positive side of the ledger. They can both hit. They can both pitch, even if some observers wonder just when the Rangers’ ordinarily unsteady bullpen runs out of postseason mojo. They’ll throw out future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander (Astros) against Jordan Montgomery (Rangers—and the guy who runs Yankee fan temperatures up the scales because the Yankees let him escape in 2022) for Game One.

And they’re both managed by men who know how to keep the horses running reasonably while not letting the moments overwhelm them too heavily. Bruce Bochy vs. Dusty Baker. It almost sounds like Casey Stengel (the Yankee version) vs. Joe McCarthy (also the Yankee version). Almost. Though I can’t imagine either man having any kind of flair for Casey’s Stengelese triple-talking wit and wonder.

So on with the show. Brought to you by The Company. Who remind you that sixty-seven years after its birth, it’s now . . . sixty-seven years later.

The last of the big boys buried

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Johan Rojas

Young center fielder Johan Rojas making the catch of his life so far, robbing Ronald Acuña, Jr. of a possible Game Four-changing double and saving the Phillies’ NLDS triumph in the bargain Thursday night.

If you consider 100+ game regular season winners the truly big boys, they’ve all been knocked out of the postseason before it even got to the League Championship Series. The 90-game winning Phillies secured that dubious distinction when they sent the Braves home for the winter Thursday night.

And they didn’t need Bryce Harper to do the heavy lifting this time. Nick Castellanos was more than happy to do that when he hit two more solo home runs, this time off the Braves’ best starting pitcher, this time making himself the first man ever to hit two bombs each in two postseason games.

Spencer Strider all but owned the Phillies in regular season play. In postseason play the Phillies puncture him just enough, including in their National League division series Game Four. And, unlike a lot of young men whose ownership thus becomes subject to hostile postseason takeover, Strider didn’t flinch when asked the wherefore.

“I’m not a person that makes excuses,” Strider said after the Phillies punched their NLCS ticker with an emphatic enough 3-1 win. “I’m sure there’s a lot of Braves fans out there that are not happy, and they have every right to be that way. We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. Me personally, I wasn’t good enough.”

Neither did he flinch when asked whether the postseason system awarding byes to the top two seeds in each league harmed the Braves for the extra week off.

“I think that the people trying to use the playoff format to make an excuse for the results they don’t like are not confronting the real issue,” Strider continued. “You’re in control of your focus, your competitiveness, your energy. And if having five days off (means) you can’t make that adjustment, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”

“We got beat,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said, “by a really good club that has a penchant for this time of year.”

For me, the real issue is letting teams into the postseason at all who give their fans the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place. Forcing the teams who owned the regular season to run the gamut through lesser-performing teams in order to even think about a shot at the World Series.

And yet, it couldn’t hurt to watch the games, anyhow.

Especially between the Braves and the Phillies, finishers one and two in the National League East. Especially since the Braves were the only departing division champions who didn’t get swept out of what’s now their only postseason set of the year.

The Phillies didn’t have easy work to do. Not against the team who hit a record 307 regular-season home runs. But nobody figured anyone, never mind the Phillies, to out-homer these Braves in this division series 11-3, with Castellanos and Harper accounting for 63 percent of those bombs, and Harper himself hitting as many homers as the entire Braves team for the set.

And, with Ronald Acuña, Jr., Mr. 40/70, held to three hits without reaching the seats while walking twice but stealing nothing.

The nearest Acuña got to serious damage was in the top of the Game Four seventh. With Cardiac Craig Kimbrel relieving Jose Alvarado, entering a first-and-second jam, Kimbrel went from 1-2 to 2-2 before handing Acuña something to drive to the back of center field. Citizens Bank Park’s crash carts were on red alert.

Then young Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas, who wasn’t hitting much but who was making his bones with the leather (he was worth nine defensive runs on the regular season), ran the drive down and, after one hesitation step at the track, hauled it in on the track two steps shy of the wall . . . and just shy of becoming at least a two and possibly three-run double.

Strider dodged a Harperian bullet in the first inning Thursday night. He had Trea Turner on second with a one-out double down the left field line and off the wall. He tried to pitch around Harper, knowing that Harper needs only one swing to wage nuclear destruction, but after falling behind 3-0, Braves manager Brian Snitker said don’t even think about it, put him on.

For that moment Snitker resembled Casey Stengel the Yankee dominator, as Strider struck Alec Bohm out and got Bryson Stott to fly out to center field for the side. Strider didn’t look overwhelming with two walks and two hits on his jacket in two innings. He needed help from center fielder Michael Harris II again, Harris making a highlight-reel sliding catch of Rojas’s one-out liner to center in the second, then doubling Castellanos off second for the side.

The Phillies’ plate plan included just making Strider throw as many pitches as possible whatever the results. But they wouldn’t say no if an early count pitch looked delicious enough to dine. With one out in the bottom of the fourth, and the Braves up 1-0 thanks to Austin Riley’s solo homer in the top of the frame, Strider served Castellanos just such a slider, and Castellanos served it into the left field seats.

Phillies shortstop Trea Turner saw a similar feast heading his way on the first pitch with one out in the bottom of the fifth, breaking the tie with his own launch into the left field seats. Until then, Turner had faced Strider seventeen times in his career and gone hitless for his effort. What a difference two months plus makes.

One moment, in August, Turner’s struggles were so profound that someone asked, and Phillies fans agreed, to bathe him in cheers just for encouragement his first time up. Now, he put the Phillies in the lead and would finish the set with a 1.441 OPS for it. He also finished a triple short of the cycle in Game Three and became the first Phillie—ever—to have a 4-for-4 game in a postseason set.

An inning after Turner unloaded, Castellanos finished Strider’s evening’s work with another solo homer. This time, Castellanos was kind enough not to do it on the first pitch, hitting a 1-2 fastball not too far from where his first bomb landed.

The Braves had one more shot at forcing a fifth game in the ninth. Marcell Ozuna wrung a leadoff walk out of Phillies reliever Gregory Soto and Sean Murphy singled him to third. Exit Soto, enter Matt Strahm. He got Kevin Pillar to pop out behind second base where Turner hauled it in; he got pinch hitter Eddie Rosario to fly out to left not deep enough to score Ozuna; and, he landed a swinging strikeout on pinch hitter Vaughan Grissom.

That sealed the fate of the Braves who’ve been ousted from two straight postseasons after winning the 2021 World Series. This time, the Phillies pitching staff and defense found a way to keep their regular-season threshing machine from threshing in this set. (Their NLDS slash: .186/.255/.264.) The Braves’ pitching staff and defense couldn’t stop the Phillies from looking . . . almost like the regular-season Braves. (The Phillies: NLDS slash: .275/.373/.565.)

“Obviously, we’re going to have to make an adjustment in the way we handle the postseason and the way that we focus and prepare for it,” Strider said, “but we’re going to get to work the moment we get out of here.”

Like the Dodgers, the Braves had compromised starting pitching. They missed veteran Charlie Morton, dealing with an index finger injury. Also, having Max Fried pitch only once in three weeks prior to Game Two because of finger blistering hurt.

But Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who pinch hit for Harris in the Game Four seventh and drew the bases-loading walk from Kimbrel, handed the Phillies the major credit. “All of them stepped up,” he said. “All of their big offense and their pitching. Their bullpen all stepped up. Their starters all stepped up. Ranger had a tremendous series, Zack (Wheeler) had a tremendous game, (Aaron) Nola, their whole bullpen. Their pitching was unbelievable.”

Wheeler, Nola, and Game Four starter Ranger Suárez have started all six Phillies postseason games thus far. Their collective ERA for the span: 1.54. The Phillies bullpen over the same six games: 1.29 ERA. D’Arnaud may have made the understatement of the postseason through today.

“In baseball, it’s not always the best team that wins, it’s the team that plays the best that day,” said Braves reliever A.J. Minter, who surrendered one earned run in two and a third series innings. “And they played better than us, that’s what it came down to. We’ve just got to come back this offseason and be ready to go at spring training . . . When we won the World Series in ’21, we weren’t necessarily the best team.”

The best team doesn’t always win. You can ask the 1921 Yankees, the 1924 Giants, the 1952 Dodgers, the 1954 Indians, the 1969 Orioles, the 1981 Reds, the 1987 Tigers and Cardinals, the 1990 Athletics, and the 2001 Mariners, among others. Now, you can ask this year’s Braves, Brewers, Dodgers, Orioles, and Rays, too. Those were baseball’s top five teams this season.

But now the number six Astros go to the American League Championship Series against the number eight Rangers, and the Astros will be the only division winner involved in an LCS. The number seven Phillies go to the National League Championship Series against the number twelve Diamondbacks. There’s a reasonable if not ironclad chance that baseball’s seventh or twelfth best team could face its eighth best team in the World Series.

You tell me something isn’t terribly wrong with that picture no matter how much fun the games were to watch, anyway. No matter how much you loved Harper answering the post-Game Two trolling Braves. No matter how much you loved Castellanos’s Games Three and Four demolition or Harper’s continuation as his own kind of Mr. October. No matter how much you loved watching the Phillies’ pitching keep the Braves from truly serious mischief. No matter how much fun we’ll have watching the two LCSes, anyhow.

Just don’t ask commissioner Rob Manfred.

“I’m sort of the view you need to give something a chance to work out,” Manfred said. “I know some of the higher-seeded teams didn’t win. I think if you think about where some of those teams were, there are other explanations than a five-day layoff. But I think we’ll reevaluate in the offseason like we always do and think about if we have the format right . . . It’s Year Two (of the three-wild-card format). I think we need to give it a little time . . . We all want the competition to be the best it can possibly be.”

As the great (and Spink Award-winning Hall of Fame) New York Times baseball writer Red Smith once said of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn dismissing Curt Flood’s reserve challenge out of mealymouthed hand, Commissioner Pepperwinkle really seems to be saying, “Run along, sonny, you bother me.”

Snakes alive!

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Arizona Diamondbacks

Assorted Diamondbacks take a victory dip in the Chase Field pool after they swept the Dodgers in their NLDS Wednesday.

This may actually be the worst Dodger takedown of all time. They’ve suffered legendary takedowns as much as legendary triumphs in their storied history, but this one may actually out-rank all the others.

Worse than the day the Philadelphia Whiz Kids’ veteran Dick Sisler ruined them on the season’s final day after Cal Abrams couldn’t score from first to keep the pennant-losing game out of an extra inning.

Worse than the day Bobby Thomson ruined Ralph Branca after a second-half Giants surge from thirteen games back through the lens of Leo Durocher’s telescopic from-the-clubhouse sign-stealing.

Worse than the day a still-not-himself Sandy Koufax couldn’t hold the Giants off in another pre-division play, three-game pennant playoff deciding game. Worse than the week the Orioles swept them in a World Series.

Worse than the day Tommy Lasorda let Tom Niedenfuer pitch to Jack (the Ripper) Clark with first base open and the Dodgers an out from forcing a seventh National League Championship Series game. Worse than back-to-back World Series losses in 2017-2018.

Never before were the Dodgers swept out of a postseason set in which all three Dodgers starting pitchers including a future Hall of Famer combined to pitch four and two thirds innings.

And never before had any team surrendered four postseason home runs in a single inning until Lance Lynn, the husky righthander who was the Dodgers’ key trade deadline pitching pickup, but who surrendered a Show-leading 44 home runs all regular season long, went to work for the third inning of their National League division series Game Three.

Geraldo Perdomo, Diamondbacks shortstop—leadoff home run. Ketel Marte, Diamondbacks second baseman, an out later—home run. Christian Walker, Diamondbacks first baseman, an out after that—home run. Gabriel Moreno, Diamondbacks catcher, following Walker, and after a long drive ruled just foul—home run.

None of baseball’s classic slugging teams ever did in any postseason what the Snakes did in that inning. Not the Ruth-Gehrig Yankees. Not the Foxx-Simmons-Grove Athletics. Not the DiMaggio-Berra-Mantle Yankees. Not the Boys of Summer Dodgers. Not the Mantle-Maris Yankees. Not the Swingin’ As or the Big Red Machine. Not the Pittsburgh Lumber Company, Harvey’s Wallbangers, or the Bash Brothers A’s.

“I’m a fan, too,” said Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo, after his Snakes banked the 4-2 win, the division series sweep, and a date with either the Phillies or the Braves in the National League Championship Series, “and I was looking at it thinking, what in the world is happening here?”

So were the Dodgers. Maybe all series long, never mind in the third inning Wednesday night.

“You look at the game, the series, they outplayed us, and there’s no other spin to it,” said manager Dave Roberts. “As far as our clubhouse, it’s just a lot of disappointment.”

As far as the Diamondbacks clubhouse, this team of rising youth, veterans who’ve been called “quirky” among other things, role players, and about as much star power yet as a cactus plant, has arrived. They slipped into the postseason via the wild card system after an 84-win season, swept the Brewers out of the wild card series, then dismantled a Dodger team full of stars who’d usually dismantled them while owning the National League West for most of a previous decade.

And they couldn’t have cared less about the financial power behind that Dodger star power, either. “We shouldn’t be worried about what their payroll is or who they’ve got over there,” said Snakes outfielder Alek Thomas after Game Three. “We’re just worried about what’s right in here in this clubhouse. You saw that this series.”

“They kept punching us in the face,” lamented Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernandez, “and we weren’t able to get back up.”

Just when did the Diamondbacks and their fans really start believing they might have more than a few lessons to teach the pitching-compromised Dodgers (three injured starters, a fourth on administrative leave over domestic violence charges) and the country this time around?

Was it when they bludgeoned six runs out of a possibly still-ailing and finally out of fuel Clayton Kershaw in the Game One first?

Was it when they pried three Game Two first-inning runs out of Bobby Miller, the Dodger rookie who’d looked promising enough over the regular season but now looked as though he was in enough over his 24-year-old head?

Was it after Lynn actually spent the first two Game Three innings on cruise control despite a pair of second-inning hits, before Perdomo hit a 2-1 meatball over the right center field fence, Marte hit a 1-0 service into the right field seats, Walker hit a 3-1 meatball into the left field seats, and Moreno hit a full-count hanging slider into the left center field seats to end Lynn’s night?

Was it when the Diamondbacks’ bullpen, formerly cause for plenty of alarm, left the torches behind long enough to surrender only four of the six series-long Dodger runs?

The Dodger bullpen did what their starters couldn’t do and kept them alive and within reach in the final two games. But their big bats couldn’t do anything, either. Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman may have posted Most Valuable Player-style regular seasons, but after fueling the Dodgers lineup all year long they went 1-for-21 together in the division series.

“I know for sure I did absolutely nothing to help us win,” Betts acknowledged. It was the first postseason series of his entire career in which the Mookie Monster went hitless.

“It doesn’t feel real,” Diamondbacks rookie star Corbin Carroll said after Game Three ended. This is a team with whom the Dodgers had their regular season way from 2021-2023, the Dodgers going 38-13 against them over the span.

But the division-series beatdown they laid upon the Dodgers was real enough. And it’ll feel even more real to the Dodgers as they face a winter whose number one mandate will be figuring out how to turn their regular-season dominance into anything other than postseason submission.

NLDS Game Three: Poke the Philly bear, pay the penalty

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Bryce Harper, Orlando Arcia

“Stare downs aren’t an official stat (yet!), but we’re all in awe of Harper over here.”—The Elias Sports Bureau.

Memo to: Atlanta Braves, particularly shortstop Orlando Arcia. Subject: Poking the Philadelphia bear. Dear Braves; dear Orlando: just. don’t. do it. For real or allegedly.

Because the Philadelphia bear, whose human name is Bryce Harper, is liable to do to you what Yogi Bear only dreamed of doing with the contents of picnic baskets. He’s also liable to inspire similar destruction by his mates while he’s at it. And that Citizens Bank Park crowd in Philadelphia won’t let you live it down.

Whether Arcia really cracked “ha ha, attaboy, Harper” Monday—after Harper was doubled up by a hair to end National League division series Game Two, having rounded second on a long fly that looked as much like an extra base hit as an out before Michael Harris II’s stupefying catch—might have been speculative alone.

But it appeared in print, as you might expect when there might be three to five times more reporters in a postseason clubhouse than a regular season one. As Phillies manager Rob Thomson said Wednesday, after Harper and company demolished the Braves, 10-2, “If that adds to his motivation, then thank you.”

Affirming that the Monday mockery did indeed come from his postgame mouth, Arcia told reporters after Game Three, “He wasn’t supposed to hear.” Whether he meant Harper or the reporter(s) who put it into print wasn’t entirely clear, and hardly mattered. It wasn’t wise to poke a bear who had the entire Show’s second highest win probability added factor this year.

Harper swore he heard of Arcia’s trash talking from teammates. “They looked at me,” he said, “and they were like, ‘What are you going to do?’” It wouldn’t take too long before they got their answer.

With the game tied at one following Nick Castellanos’s leadoff bomb in the bottom of the third, Brandon Marsh singled promptly and Trea Turner pushed him to third beating out an infield single against Braves starter Bryce Elder, who can be a good pitcher but who’d spent the season’s second half struggling heavily.

Up stepped Harper. He took two low and away pitches after fouling off the first. Then, he ripped a hanging slider into the second deck behind right field. Rounding second, Harper gave Arcia a stare that would have meant a death sentence had it come from a Mafia caporegime.

“Stare downs aren’t an official stat (yet!),” Xtweeted the Elias Sports Bureau, “but we’re all in awe of Harper over here.”

The demolition that followed—including a second Harper homer—could be considered the Braves’ death sentence, depending upon how well they regroup and recoup behind Game One starter Spencer Strider on Thursday. And, whether Strider himself can handle the Phillies a little better than he had (eight strikeouts but two runs including a Harper smash) in Game One.

After Monday’s Braves one-run win, preserved by Harris’s acrobatic catch and third baseman Austin Riley’s swift throw across to nip Harper by a step and a half to finish the unlikely double play, Castellanos didn’t sound too worried. “We thrive after we get punched in the face,” he said.

Thrive? How about feeding frenzy. Right after Harper unloaded, Alec Bohm shot a base hit into left, Bryson Stott walked, and J.T. Realmuto pumped a two-run double to the back of left field. And every Braves fan in the nation probably asked why manager Brian Snitker—who started Elder with no better options available for this game—didn’t have anyone up in the pen yet.

“I thought maybe he would go five,” Snitker said of Elder, whose first two innings were deceptively masterful with six-up, six-down including four strikeouts, and who had a one-run lead after Ozzie Albies singled Ronald Acuña, Jr. (one-out double) home in the top of the third. “The way Bryce was throwing, I was thinking, ‘Man, he was really good.’ The slider was good. The changeup was good. It was the third inning of the game, with a lot to cover on the back end of it.”

It turned out the Braves had to find ways to cover a five-run Phillies lead after the bottom of the third’s demolition finally ended. But two innings later, leading off against veteran Brad Hand, the third Braves reliever of the day, Harper launched one parabolically over the center field fence. And gave Arcia a second stare down rounding second while he was at it.

Arcia extracted his own ounce of flesh when he singled Marcel Ozuna (one-out single) home against Phillies reliever Matt Strahm with two out in the top of the sixth. That’d teach him further. With two out in the bottom of that inning, Trea Turner shot one over the left center field fence off AJ Smith-Shawver, the fourth Braves pitcher on the night. Smith-Shawver endured long enough for Castellanos and Marsh to greet him rudely opening the bottom of the eighth with back-to-back solo bombs into the real estate Turner had reached.

Nothing—not even Phillies starter Aaron Nola’s nine-strikeout, five-and-two-thirds innings work, which somehow got pushed well into the background thanks to their offensive mayhem—quite equaled the magnitude of Harper’s first blast in the third, but when he hit the second in the fifth, he pushed himself into extremely elite territory—and pushed Hall of Famer in waiting Albert Pujols out of it.

Pujols was fifth in postseason OPS among men with at least 150 postseason plate appearances with .995; Harper shot his way past Pujols with what’s now 1.011. Ahead of him, in ascending order: Carlos Beltrán (1.021) and Hall of Famers George Brett (1.023), Babe Ruth (1.214), and Lou Gehrig (1.214). Harper also has a 1.132 OPS in this postseason alone thus far.

According to the reboutable MLB analyst Sarah Langs, Harper has also homered in eight postseason games since becoming a Phillie—and the team’s 8-0 in those games. Tying Harper with a longtime Brave, Javy Lopez, for the longest such postseason streak ever for a player starting his career with a particular team . . . but the longest for any player with a new team.

And what about this year’s Atlanta threshing machine, the team who smashed a record 307 home runs on the regular season and led the National League in runs, hits, team batting average, team on-base percentage, team slugging, and team OPS? Entering Game Three, the Braves were out-scored 7-5 while posting a team 150/.215/.250 slash line and a .465 OPS.

Now, the Braves are out-scored 15-9 for the set. They’ll need more than Strider being Strider on the mound this time, though the Phillies found ways to beat him in two prior postseason chances. (Last year, they sliced him for four runs in two and a third, charging a fifth to him when Harper—who else?—hit one over the right center field fence off Strider’s relief Dylan Lee with J.T. Realmuto aboard before Strider left the game.)

The Braves need their bats to find ways around scheduled Phillies Game Four starter Ranger Suárez and a better-positioned Phillies bullpen. They need Acuña to hit truly like the 40/70 player he was on the season. They need Snitker to do better in the bullpen management department.

Mostly, they need to find ways to keep Harper from Harpering. They also need to remind themselves that not even Harper takes them for granted.

“We know they’re really good, and they’re not going to fall down or die or anything like that,” Harper said after Game Three. “They’re a really, really good organization, a really good team, and we’ve seen that all year from them. But we have a crowd that’s 45 (thousand) strong, and we’re very excited to go into tomorrow and play a great game.”

If the Phillies are that excited, the Braves might be in more trouble than even Game Three made them look.

ALDS Game Three: Baltimore Agonistes

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Baltimore Orioles

After their surprising and pleasing AL East conquest, the inexperienced, pitching-compromised Orioles found the AL West-winning Rangers too hot to handle.

Maybe it had to be this way, an inexperienced team of Orioles upstarts getting flattened by a better-experienced collection of Rangers in three straight. It might have been the team’s first postseason appearance in seven years, but they brought a collection of men with plenty of postseason time among themselves before becoming Rangers.

Maybe the Orioles were in over their own mostly young, 101 game-winning heads. Maybe the Rangers were too well primed by their Hall of Fame-bound manager who’d skippered three Series winners in five years on the Giants’ bridge.

But as joyous as it was to see the Rangers make too-easy work of the Orioles in this American League division series, it still hurt to see these Orioles swept away like flotsam and jetsam. It was the first time they’d been swept in any series since the May emergence of Adley Rutschman as both their regular catcher and their team leader. The first, and the worst, at once.

No matter how heavily tanking played a role in getting the Orioles to the point of winning the American League East, it hurt. No matter how stupid their administration looked censoring their lead television broadcaster—over a team-generated graphic meant to show a positive portion of their progress—it hurt.

No matter how further stupid that administration looked in doing practically nothing at the trade deadline despite having an upstart group of American League East conquerors on their hands—it hurt.

And, no matter how temporarily stuck Orioles manager Brandon Hyde might have looked  having to start a heavy-hearted pitcher in his fourth major league season but on his first postseason assignment in Game Three—it hurt.

“This is a really good group of guys,” said pitcher Kyle Gibson, a pending free agent, “and I think that adds to the sting of it too, because we knew we had something special. You want to try to capitalize on that whenever you can.”

“There’s no other way to put it,” said outfielder Austin Hays. “They kicked our ass. It sucks. Just couldn’t really get anything going, couldn’t get any momentum on our side to get things going. It hurts. It really hurts.”

The real-world motto of the real-world Texas Rangers: “One riot, one Ranger.” The motto of the American League West winners now could be: “Two postseason sweeps, thirty Rangers.”

The Rangers picked up where they left off Tuesday night against a flock of Orioles lacking veteran presence and, especially, veteran pitching, beating the Orioles, 7-1, in a game that was essentially over after two innings. Manager Bruce Bochy, in the conversation for Manager of the Year as it is, looked even smarter in this AL division series than he looked winning with the Giants in 2010, 2012, and 2014—and he looked like the Yankee version of Casey Stengel then.

Even more so because, until Tuesday night, the AL West-champion Rangers had to to their heaviest labours on the road. “We had our work cut out going on the road against Tampa and Baltimore,” Bochy said after wrapping the division series Tuesday night. “Just shows the toughness with this ballclub and the deal with having to fly to Tampa.”

Now they were home and happy in Globe Life Field, and Rangers shortstop Corey Seager didn’t give Orioles starter Dean Kremer a chance to continue collecting himself after second baseman Marcus Semien fouled out to open the bottom of the first. Seager smashed a 1-1 service 445 feet over the right field fence.

An inning later, it was one-out single (Josh Jung), two-out double (Semien), and an intentional walk to Seager. Kremer and the Orioles weren’t going to give him another chance to mash with first base open if they could help it. They took their chances with Mitch Garver, whose Game Two grand slam broke them almost in half—and Garver thanked them with a two-run double.

Up stepped Adolis García, the Rangers’ right fielder. Kremer had García down 1-2. The next fastball, a little up over the middle of the zone, disappeared over the left center field fence. Just like that, the Orioles were in a 6-1 hole out of which they wouldn’t get to within sight of the earth’s surface if the Rangers could help it.

They could. Their redoubtable starter Nathan Evoaldi, who’s been there and done that in postseasons previous, pinned them for seven innings and seven strikeouts, the only blemish against him an almost excuse-me RBI single by Orioles rookie star Gunnar Henderson in the top of the fifth. As if to drive yet another exclamation point home, Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe greeted Gibson, the third of five Oriole pitchers on the night, with a leadoff homer in the bottom of the sixth.

“You’re not trying to do anything different,” said Seager, whose nine walks are a record for a three-game postseason span, according to MLB analyst Sarah Langs. “You’re just more focused. That’s not the right word, but it’s just more intense. Everything matters. It’s just a different game. It really is. There’s no way around it. So you have to have a different edge, different approach.”

Kremer’s heavy heart was thanks to the atrocity Hamas inflicted upon Israel, to which his parents are native and for which they both served in the Israeli Defense Forces before emigrating to California where their son was born. But he told Hyde when asked—this was discussed often on the game broadcast—that no matter what was in the back of his mind or the front of his heart, he could go for Game Three.

He still has extended family living in Israel. (He’s also said he do as Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax and decline to pitch if an assignment happens to fall on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.) Anyone who thinks Kremer still didn’t take a heavy heart to the mound with him Tuesday night may be deluding himself or herself.

Perhaps if Hyde had more choices he might have told Kremer to forget the mound for now and focus upon his family. But the Orioles standing pat at the trade deadline, other than adding Cardinals comer-turned-injury-compromised righthander Jack Flaherty, who’d pitched his way out of their rotation to become a bullpen option, came back to haunt them horribly this series.

They were forced to hold veteran ace/post-Tommy John surgery patient John Means out of the division series because of late September elbow soreness—and had no reinforcements. They lost relief ace Felíx Bautista to a torn ulnar colateral ligament that took him to Tommy John surgery on Monday—and rode their bullpen a little too hard compensating for their lack of rotation depth down the stretch and in the division series after the AL East championship bye week off.

So their survival depended upon a young man with a temporarily compromised heart. Kremer went out courageously enough and found the Rangers a little too hot to handle after all. However the Rangers might have empathised with him, that didn’t mean they were going to let him off the hook.

That survival also depended upon an offense that dissipated near season’s end. Even when they awoke well enough in Game Two, turning what began as a 9-2 blowout in the making into an 11-8 squeaker of a loss. “Offensively, we weren’t at our best the last two, three weeks of the season,” Hyde said. “That carried into the postseason where we had guys scuffling. [The Rangers] rolled in with a ton of momentum. I don’t think we rolled in with a ton of momentum offensively.”

The Rangers had to dispatch the Rays in two straight wild card series games before taking the Orioles to school. Eovaldi pitched both series winners.

“I’ve never had a curtain call or anything like that,” said the veteran righthander whose six-inning relief in that eighteen-inning World Series Game Three marathon in 2018 really put him on the baseball map, and who took such a call after his Tuesday night’s work ended. “But our fans were bringing it all night long. When I walked out at 6:30 tonight, they were chanting, the ‘Let’s go Rangers.’ I knew it was going to be a really good night for us.”

He couldn’t have known just how good. For Eovaldi and his Rangers, it’s on to take on whomever wins the Twins-Astros division series in the American League Championship Series.

For these Orioles, it’s on to reflect upon how far they got in the first place despite almost nobody imagining them here when the season began. They have a core that can win again next year. All their administration has to do is refuse to hesitate on opening the trade lines and the checkbooks a little deeper. Knowing this Oriole administration, alas, good luck with that.