The Milwaukee Brewers challenged traditional position labels all season. They’ve helped push bullpenning forward in the postseason. They’ve been the most forward-thinking club this October in part out of necessity, entering the playoffs with one of the weaker starting rotations in the field. But they’ve never been more radical than they were early in Wednesday […]
With two outs and a man on base in the ninth inning Sunday, Alex Bregman grimaced after connecting on a Craig Kimbrel offering. He had just missed a game-tying homer, instead hitting a fly ball that fell into Andrew Benintendi’s glove on the warning track in front of the Green Monster for the final out. […]
Winning the offseason — signing the marquee free agent and/or making the headline-grabbing trade — does not correlate strongly with actual winning. The San Diego Padres “won” the 2014-15 offseason by adding Craig Kimbrel, James Shields and a host of other players, then went on to lose 88 games the following season. The previous winter, […]
gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s postseason MLB chat. We are done with the one-game wild-card playoffs. We are done with the one-game playoffs to figure out who would play in the one-game playoffs. And the Oakland Athletics and the Chicago Cubs are the first casualties of October. I think Oakland has to […]
This Major League Baseball postseason, and in particular this wild-card round, might represent a tipping point in pitching strategy. Relievers accounted for a record 17,415⅓ innings this season, topping the record set last year of 16,469⅔ innings. Major league relievers accounted for 40.1 percent of total innings thrown this season, a record share of workload. […]