All the best to the Chicago Bears across the pond this morning …
- The NLCS and ALCS are now both set, with the Dodgers winning Friday night, and then the Guardians beating the Tigers yesterday:
- A pretty incredible run for the Tigers, from lightly selling at the deadline, all the way to being within a game of the ALCS. Guardians are a really good team, though, and there’s no shame in losing in five.
- So those Guardians will now face the Yankees in the ALCS (kicks off Monday night), with the Dodgers and Mets starting the NLCS today. For all the grousing about the playoff format, things wound up working out just fine:
- Another thing that played out close to chalk? The money. The Mets, Yankees, and Dodgers are the three top payrolls in baseball (all over $300 million), with the Guardians obviously doing their usual Cleveland low-budget thing. Having a huge payroll ALONE does not get you into the the playoffs for a deep run, but year after year after year we see that, in the aggregate, spending more money tends to lead to more wins. Not only can you buy up more talent and depth, but you can also paper over mistakes that you’ve made with more signings.
- All four of the LCS participants had the bye or the huge payroll or both.
- Another top Dodgers pitching prospect comes up to the big leagues, impresses, and then requires surgery:
- The Dodgers aren’t alone in having lots of pitchers get injured, of course, but they are increasingly the clear leader in having minor league pitchers really explode with stuff and velocity, reach the upper minors or big leagues, and then break. We don’t have to pretend anymore like there isn’t at least some relationship between velocity/extreme spin and arm issues, and sooner rather than later it’ll be fair to wonder whether the Dodgers are making the right trade-offs. Not every guy who jumps to the upper-90s in velo or develops a 3000 RPM sweeper will suffer a serious arm injury, and organizations – and players – are going to keep chasing those things because they help get batters out. I don’t know the exact answer here, but I do know that there’s only so much value in becoming the world’s nastiest pitching prospect on the Injured List.
- This is even dirtier than I remember it being at the time:
- How DARE you try to take this away from the Cubs:
- October 13: