One Stroke Of The Pen(nant)

You hear this phrase in government and elections sometimes, usually as a warning to scare voters: If you don't re-elect me, all the Great Things I've done can be un-done with "one stroke of a pen" by that other evil person.

You might have noticed that this year's postseason eventually looked a lot like last year's. (Aside from, ya know, neutral sites and the lack of fans.) Three of the final four combatants were the same, and the one spot that flipped-- from the Rays to the Red Sox-- happened because Boston beat Tampa Bay in the previous round. The NLCS was exactly the same matchup. Yet, like Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison trading the presidency in the 1890s, last year's losers end up being this year's winners.

Sale Items May Run Out Early

You've heard it applied to most team sports: "Offense wins games, defense wins championships." So how did the Astros end up winning this without much of either one? (Go ahead, yell that other answer, you know you want to.)

You may remember Framber Valdez's unconvincing 4-run start in Game 2 of the Division Series against Chicago. The good news is that in Game 1 against Boston, he didn't give up 4 runs. However, that's only because the defense turned double plays to get him out of jams in both the 1st and 2nd innings. He ends up getting pulled in the 3rd after three more hits including a homer from Enrique Hernandez, a walk, and a booted force attempt by Jose Altuve. Meanwhile, Chris Sale is, well, 50% off. He's given up 5 singles, a wild pitch, and hit a batter by the time he gets pulled in the 3rd inning as well. Remember, this isn't even a must-win game. It's Game 1. But now that we have 26-player rosters and 14 of them are pitchers, and plus we haven't played in a few days, who cares. It's the fourth Game 1 in postseason history where neither starter got through the 3rd; the previous was the famous suspended game in the 2011 ALDS. The others were in 1923 and 1966. (It also happened in the 2017 Wild Card game, but that's not really a "Game 1" because it's not a series.)

Maybe Cristian Javier and Adam Ottavino should have started instead. Because they kept everything quiet for the middle innings with the Sawx holding the 3-1 advantage. Until the 6th when Tanner Houck takes the mound and Altuve atones for his fielding gaffe. That would be a game-tying 2-run homer, getting Valdez off the hook. He's the second starter in Astros history to gave up 6 hits, 3 walks, not finish the 3rd, and not get a loss, and when Framber Valdez is managing the Astros in 2043, you heard it here first. The other pitcher to do that was Larry Dierker on July 13, 1975. (Dierker eventually became Astros manager in 1997, hence the 22-year gap.)

Altuve's homer was followed an inning later by Carlos Correa's go-ahead bomb. He also hit an 11th-inning walkoff in Game 2 of the 2019 ALCS against the Yankees, and is the first player to have multiple go-ahead postseason homers in the 7th or later at Minute Maid. And an insurance run never hurts, so Jose Altuve will tack on a sac fly in the 8th. He also had a homer and 3 RBI as the Astros leadoff batter in the final game of the Division Series, joining Davey Lopes (1978) and Lenny Dykstra (1993) as the only leadoff batters to do that twice in the same postseason.

And hey, insurance can come in handy when someone else hits you. Especially if "you" are Ryan Pressly and "someone else" is Enrique Hernandez's solo homer to lead off the 9th. In what will become a theme in this series, that gives him 4 hits including 2 homers (remember he hit the one off Valdez in the 3rd), the first leadoff batter in Red Sox history to do that in a loss (ever, including the regular season). Only four Sawx leadoff batters have ever had the 2 homers in a postseason game, win or lose; the others are Johnny Damon in 2004, Harry Hooper in 1915, and the king of all things first-ever-postseason, Patsy Dougherty from the first modern World Series in 1903. Dougherty and Hernandez share one other note, that of being the only Sawx leadoff batters with 11 total bases in a loss; Dougherty did it before that first World Series, in a regular-season game on July 29, 1903. The only other leadoff batter besides Hernandez to do it in a postseason loss was George Brett in the 1978 ALCS.

Slam Your Body Down

So after Game 1 "featured" sixteen pitchers, predictably the most ever in any postseason Game 1 (make it stop!), you would hope somebody would go more than 2 innings in Game 2. Certainly the managers were hoping that. At least this time one of them got their wish. And the other ended up winning the series. Because, you know, defense wins championships.

But offense wins games, and this one will be remembered as simply grand. Luis Garcia, who also followed Framber Valdez in the Division Series, and also sputtered his way to 5 runs, did both of those things again. And this time it only took 3 outs. Kyle Schwarber led off the game with a double, joining Dustin Pedroia (2016) and Jacoby Ellsbury (twice) as the only Red Sox batters to do that in a postseason road contest. Garcia then walked two more batters to set up the second 1st-inning grand slam in Red Sox postseason history. And they've both been hit by "J.D."s; the other was by Mr. Drew in Game 6 of the 2007 ALCS against Cleveland. (Also fun fact: J.D. Drew is not actually J.D. Drew. He's D.J. Drew (David Jonathan) but went by John as a kid so it got reversed.)

Not getting reversed: The Red Sox lead in this one. Garcia issued a leadoff walk in the 2nd and then took himself out of the game citing a "knee strain". This, of course, led to one of the more humorous (or excruciating) moments of the postseason because Jake Odorizzi, normally a starter, apparently needed two days' notice to throw a pitch. He went through an elaborate long-toss routine, some wind sprints, all with 40,000 fans and both teams looking on, before even starting to throw any warmup pitches. Depending on when you start and stop counting, the whole escapade took nearly 18 minutes, during which at least one broadcast falsely declared that the umpires were powerless to stop it. And obviously that still wasn't long enough. Because Odorizzi gave up two more singles and then-- say it with us-- another grand slam. No team in postseason history had hit two slams in the same game, and the only other time the Red Sox ever hit them in both the 1st and 2nd innings was August 7, 1984, by Bill Buckner and Tony Armas. And since a slam, by its nature, means 4 RBI for the batter who hit it, Martinez and Devers become just the third teammates in Red Sox postseason history with 4 RBI in the same game. The other pairs there are Jose Offerman and John Valentin, in an epic 23-7 game in the 1999 ALDS which will come up again; and Mo Vaughn and Nomar Garciaparra who did it the year before.

The Astros did try to make things interesting in the 9th, but they're down 9-3 and solo shots by Yuli Gurriel and Jason Castro aren't going to matter much. It was the first time Houston hit multiple 9th-inning homers when trailing by at least 5 since (surprise!) Yuli Gurriel and Evan Gattis against the Cubs on September 11, 2016. Meanwhile, Castro, who subbed in as catcher in the 7th, became the second player in Astros postseason history with a walk and a homer in a game he didn't start. The other is, well, a little more famous.

Please Come To Boston

So back to Boston we go, knowing that we will at least need all three games there. And after Framber Valdez and Luis Garcia both failed to finish the 3rd, certainly Jose Urquidy can-- um, yeah, no, he can't either. Defense wins championships, remember? Urquidy does get through the 1st inning without allowing a grand slam. But then a double and 2 walks in the 2nd set up Christian Vazquez for-- oh, wait, not him. He singles to give the Sawx the lead but we're playing station-to-station ball here. Still loaded for Christian Arroyo to hit the sl-- not him either? Nope, he grounds another potential double-play ball to Altuve, who once again boots it. Instead of being out of the inning with 1 run, the Astros are still facing a bases-loaded situation. Third time's a charm. Kyle Schwarber launches one into the October sky for a 6-0 Boston lead which will not be threatened. Since the Sawx had just become the first team to hit two grand slams in any single postseason game, mathematically you can know that they are also the first to hit three in two games. That was also a first in Red Sox team history, regular season or post-. This also has the effect of knocking Urquidy out of the game in the 2nd inning, just the second time in postseason history that a team's first three starters of a series have failed to finish the 3rd. And the other... was last year, when the Wild Card temporarily expanded to a 3-game set, and the Padres saw Chris Paddack, Zach Davies, and Craig Stammen all do it. The fun part? They won the series too. Defense wins championships. (Or not.)

Vazquez and Arroyo, who missed their chance at grand-slam glory in the 2nd, are going to pile on against Yimi Garcia in the 3rd and run this thing to 9-0. Arroyo ends up as just the second #9 batter in Sawx postseason history with 2 runs scored and 3 RBI in a game; the other was Trot Nixon in (we told you this would come up again) the 23-7 game in the 1999 ALDS. The 12-3 final score would be the largest home win in a postseason game for Boston since downing the Rays 12-2 in the opener of the 2013 Division Series. Because offense wins games.

Game 4-- or at least eight-ninths of it-- was not an offensive explosion. It's Zack Greinke, who's climbing the ladder with his 20th postseason start, against Nick Pivetta who threw those four outstanding innings to get the win in that 13-inning Division Series game with the Rays. The teams did trade home runs in the 1st inning, Alex Bregman off Pivetta and then Xander Bogaerts off Zack Greinke. (This inspired us to see if there had ever been a homer hit by an "X" off a "Z" before. And yes, but only one. Xavier Paul also took Greinke deep on July 25, 2013.)

Except we have multiple problems here. Greinke, who had battled several mild injuries late in the season, hadn't thrown more than 25 pitches in a month. Although Bregman's homer joined Carlos Correa (off Doug Fister) as the Astros' second 1st-inning dinger in a postseason game at Fenway, Xander's was a 2-run shot because Greinke had walked Rafael Devers. That made it the second lead-flipping homer in the 1st inning of a Sawx postseason game; the other (here it is again!) was John Valentin in that 23-7 game with Cleveland in 1999. It was also the fourth multi-run homer allowed by Greinke in the 1st inning this season, the most in his career. So could he have gone longer than 4 outs? Maybe. Did Dusty Baker want to take that chance and risk falling behind in the series 3-1? Nope. Greinke is done and the Astros are suddenly the third team in postseason history to have four starters in the same series who failed to finish the 3rd inning. The Brewers, who flirted with the "opener" idea, did it in their 2018 NLCS loss to the Dodgers, and the 1984 Padres did it in losing the World Series to Detroit.

Pivetta narrowly made it through 5 innings to qualify for a win (please rescind this rule!), but that wouldn't matter when Jose Altuve pummelled another home run off Garrett Whitlock in the 8th. That broke a tie with Derek Jeter and propelled Altuve into third place on the all-time postseason homer list, although there are of course more rounds and games now. Altuve has 21 and trails only Bernie Williams' 22 and Manny Ramirez's 29.

So we are 2-2 going to the 9th, and Alex Cora seems to realize that it would be Nate Eovaldi's "throw day" after Game 2, so why not let him "throw" in a real game? In the 9th. Of a tie game. Yyyyeah, let's see how that went. There are two strikeouts, but they're around a double and a walk. That sets up Jason Castro for a go-ahead single, joining Carlos Correa (2015) and Jake Marisnick (2014) as the only Astros to hit one of those in the 9th at Fenway. And then the wheels come off. Eovaldi walks Jose Altuve, which is sometimes not a bad idea, and his evening is over with. Alas, Martin Perez's evening is just beginning. 3-run double to Michael Brantley. Then three straight RBI singles to Yordan Alvarez, Carlos Correa, and Kyle Tucker, and this suddenly looks like a blowout at 9-2. Eovaldi got charged with 4 runs while getting 2 outs, joining Jose Santiago (1967 WS 4 at St Louis) as the only Sawx pitchers to do that and take a loss in a postseason game. And while Perez didn't technically get the loss, he didn't make things any better. He and Eovaldi are the first Boston teammates ever to give up 3+ runs while getting 2 outs in the same postseason game. And the Astros' 7-run 9th was only the fifth such inning in postseason history; the others were by the 1997 Marlins, 1990 Athletics, 1970 Orioles, and 1936 Yankees.

Launch Complete

On to Game 5, and can the Astros finally get a starting pitcher to reach the 4th inning? Well, yes they can, and in the most annoying of fashions, because Framber Valdez-- of the 3 early runs in Game 1-- retired the first 12 Red Sox batters in order and had a perfect game going into the 5th. He did not quite set off the alarms because Rafael Devers singled to start the 5th, but he also battled Chris Sale to a 1-0 score after Yordan Alvarez hit a solo homer to start the 2nd. Things stay quiet until the 6th when Alvarez hits a 2-run double to knock Sale out of the game. Ryan Brasier doesn't fare much better, giving up a double to Gurriel and a 2-run single to Jose Siri, and suddenly the Astros have erupted for 5 runs. After last night's 7-run 9th, it's the third time that Houston has hung a 5-spot in consecutive postseason games. It happened in their Division Series against Oakland last year and against Atlanta in 2004. Gurriel would go on to add two more runs with an 8th-inning single against our friend Martin Perez; he and Alvarez became the first Astros teammates ever to have 3 hits and 3 RBI in the same postseason game.

Valdez would last all the way to the 8th inning and give up only 1 run. Only two other Houston hurlers have done that in the postseason, and they were in back-to-back games. Mike Scott and Nolan Ryan did it at Shea Stadium in the 1986 NLCS.

So after dominating wins of 9-2 and 9-1, the Astros get to take this thing home and shut it down. Luis Garcia's "knee strain" (and/or, ego bruise) has magically healed in the last few days and so Dusty Baker gives him the ball in Game 6 with a game in hand. Happily we'd already done the research on Astros postseason no-hitters, because Garcia saw fit to extend Valdez's performance from Game 5. He did lose the perfect game on the very first batter when Kyle Schwarber struck out but then reached first on a wild pitch. Only one other leadoff batter in postseason history had pulled that off, Derek Jeter in 2011 ALDS 1, once again that famous suspended game between Justin Verlander and CC Sabathia. Yordan Alvarez lifted an RBI double to center later in the 1st such that the Astros were hanging on a 1-0 lead for much of the game. In a scene very different from his early departure in Game 2, Garcia would take that no-hitter into the 6th before Enrique Hernandez poked a triple into Fenway's famous "triangle". It was the second-deepest no-hitter in Astros postseason history, behind Brandon Backe's 5⅔-inning effort in Game 5 of the 2004 NLCS.

So finally defense wins championships. Eovaldi and Houck have decent games for Boston, and the Sawx still have a chance down 2-0 in the 8th, but Yordan Alvarez chases Houck with his fourth hit of the game. He was involved in both the Astros' previous runs, doubling home Alex Bregman in the 1st and then scoring after a leadoff triple in the 6th. Eovaldi stranded him after another double in the 4th. So he's already joined a short list of postseason batters with a triple and 2 doubles; it includes Carl Crawford (2008 Rays), Billy Hatcher (1990 Reds), Dane Iorg (1982 Cardinals), and Pete Rose (1976 Reds). Only one other cleanup batter in Astros history has hit a triple and 2 doubles in a game, Jeff Bagwell at Philadelphia on August 22, 1992. And when Kyle Tucker slammed a 3-run homer in the 8th to secure the pennant, it would be just the second time in ALCS history that a team advanced to the World Series via a shutout of 5-0 or more. The 1979 Orioles blanked the Angels by an 8-0 count. In the pre-LCS days, the only AL teams to clinch their pennant with a 5-0 shutout were the Tigers of 1908 (their third straight) and the Athletics in both 1914 and 1929. You may remember Tucker also hitting a 3-run dinger in Game 3 of the same series; he joins Ken Caminiti (1999 NLDS vs Braves) as the only batters in Houston postseason history with two in a series.

And granted, the two were not in the same league until 2013, but if the Red Sox had to pick a time to be shut out on 3 or fewer hits by the Astros, you can bet they wouldn't have picked an elimination game in the postseason. Because Friday's 5-0 win was the first such game in the series history between the two teams.

National Velvet

Over in the National League, well, stop us if you've seen this one before. No, wait, don't stop us, because you have seen this before and we still want you to keep reading. Because part of the beauty of baseball is that you can see the same thing mulitple times and have it not end the same way.

Last year's National League Championship Series came down to a 7-game battle between the Braves and the Dodgers. The whole mess was played at a neutral site in Arlington, and despite getting slammed 15-3 in Game 3, the Braves still took three of the first four and the Dodgers had to rally from that 3-1 deficit to advance. Sound a little familiar?

2021's championship series was allowed to be played in Atlanta finally, and amazingly the Dodgers approached this as a "bullpen" game. After grinding out a 5-game Division Series with the Giants, they sent Corey Knebel to the mound to start Game 1 against the Braves-- after Knebel had also started Game 5 against the Giants. He joined Clayton Kershaw in 2017 as the only pitchers in Dodgers history to "start" consecutive postseason games, and Kershaw's were on normal rest because they won the NLCS in 5. Knebel would go only 1 inning, because 2021, and thus also join Carl Erskine in the 1953 World Series against the Yankees as the only Dodgers "starters" to last 1 inning in a postseason game.

If you would prefer the close, "nail-biter" games as opposed to the offense/defense battle, well, this NLCS is right up your alley. After Eddie Rosario scored on a wild pitch by Knebel in the 1st, Chris Taylor tied things up with an RBI single against Braves starter Max Fried. There was then the ceremonial trading of solo homers between Will Smith and Austin Riley in the 4th. So here we are tied 2-2 in the late innings, with starting pitchers long forgotten, and Austin Riley at the plate. Blake Treinen has allowed a 1-out single to Ozzie Albies, who then stole second, and all Riley has to do is-- oh yeah, hit a walkoff. The Braves' last walkoff anything against the Dodgers was on August 17, 2012, when Juan Francisco singled off Jamey Wright. The only other Braves batter to have a game-tying hit (see: the homer) and a separate walkoff hit against the Dodgers was Jeff Blauser on July 21, 1997. Along the way Tony Gonsolin managed to be the first Dodgers relief pitcher to collect a base hit in a postseason game since Brian Holton in the 1988 NLCS against the Mets.

The Dodgers decided they would make Game 2 a little more interesting early on. Mookie Betts blooped a single into shallow left, and then Corey Seager went yard for a 2-run homer. Only two other Dodgers have hit a 2-run homer as the team's second batter of a game: Max Muncy in 2019 NLDS 5 against the Nationals, and Matt Kemp in 2009 NLDS 1 against the Cardinals. The Dodgers hadn't hit such a homer against the Braves since Franklin Stubbs took Craig McMurtry deep on June 24, 1984.

But in the 4th it's back to Joc Pederson. Against Max Scherzer. You still tend to think of Joc as a Dodger, and you're not quite used to thinking of Max as a Dodger yet. So when one homers off the other, well, it's a little weird. Turns out six other players have hit a postseason homer for the Dodgers and also against the Dodgers; they are Mookie Betts, Howie Kendrick, Manny Machado, Carlos Ruiz, Bill Skowron, and Jayson Werth.

That just means we're back to 2-2 before Chris Taylor doubles again in the 7th. The Braves fight back with Ozzie Albies and Austin Riley dropping back-to-back RBI hits in the bottom of the 8th, and combined with his walkoff in Game 1, that makes Riley the first player in Braves history with a tying or go-ahead hit in the 8th or later of consecutive postseason games.

If you're already inclined to name this The Eddie Rosario Series, you're good. It's 4-4 in the 9th when Rosario gets to face Kenley Jansen with 2 outs and Dansby Swanson at third. And on the first pitch Rosario does this. That's a second consecutive walkoff to start a postseason series; the Braves join the 1997 Marlins, 1981 Astros, and 1969 Orioles as the only teams in postseason history to do that. The Braves, for their part, had only one other postseason series with multiple walkoff wins; that was the 1991 World Series which ultimately ended with Jack Morris's 1-0, 10-inning win in Game 7. The Braves hadn't walked off the Dodgers in consecutive games in any situation since Chipper Jones and Fred McGriff did it on July 5-6, 1995.

Going Back To Cali

So our series shifts back to Dodger Stadium, which generally means the Braves aren't going to able to walk off. No worries, we can (almost) have the Dodgers do that too. Game 3 featured the well-rested Walker Buehler and Charlie Morton, neither of whom had pitched in a week, and both of whom ended up showing their share of rust. Let's check out Morton's 1st inning: Walk, 2-run homer by Corey Seager. Okay, pause. Remember Seager also hit a 2-run homer as the Dodgers' second batter in Game 2? It turns out only two other players in postseason history have done that, and neither of them was even in the same series. John Valentin of the Red Sox did it in 1999, and Aaron Judge has hit two of them, but not in the same season. And then if we resume Morton's inning, with 2 outs, we find three straight walks and a wild pitch. This is a pitcher who issued 4 walks in a game only twice all year. Not only is he the first Braves pitcher to walk four in the 1st inning of a postseason game, he's the first to do so in any game since Mike Foltynewicz against the Cardinals on September 17, 2018.

Buehler, meanwhile, gets two double plays to escape any damage until the 4th. That's when Gavin Lux-- forced into outfield duty by the loss of Max Muncy in the regular-season finale-- has a ball clang off his glove on the warning track. There is a disputed non-strike call to Joc Pederson who ends up singling in a run. A rattled Buehler then gives up two more singles and two more walks to suddenly make it 4-2 Atlanta and chase Buehler out of the game. The last time a postseason starter for the Dodgers allowed 10 baserunners and didn't get out of the 4th was the 2009 Division Series opener against St Louis when Randy Wolf did it.

So we simmer along at 5-2 for a few innings, and these Dodgers of the last few years tend not to simmer very well. Eventually they're going to start spattering all over the stovetop. Enter Cody Bellinger. And after Will Smith and A.J. Pollock both collect singles, Bellinger spatters a Luke Jackson fastball 399 feet into the bleachers in right-center. It was just the second tying or go-ahead, 3- or 4-run homer in the 8th or later in Dodgers postseason history, after Justin Turner's walkoff in the 2017 NLCS. Two batters and one pitching change later, it was Mookie Betts whose double completely boiled things over and turned this into a 6-5 Dodgers win. Over the course of Game 3, Mookie collected two hits, two walks, and a stolen base, which no leadoff hitter had done in a postseason game since Chuck Knoblauch in the 1998 World Series. And the only other go-ahead double by the Dodgers in the 8th or later of a postseason home game is one you might have heard about. It's "only" Cookie Lavagetto's pinch-hit walkoff against the Yankees in 1947 which also denied Bill Bevens the first-ever postseason no-hitter.

Luke Jackson made some dubious postseason history as well. By giving up those 4 runs and getting only 1 out, he's the first pitcher ever to do that and get both a blown save and a loss (including retroactive saves before 1969).

Everything's Coming Up Rosarios

So we have now guaranteed ourselves a Game 5 in this series, but before that must natually come Game 4. The one that will be forever known as The Eddie Rosario Game. Even surpassing the walkoff in Game 2, which was made possible by Julio Urias blowing the save in the previous inning. Oh look who's now starting Game 4. Now, we've previously established that Rosario can't hit a walkoff at Dodger Stadium, and he certainly can't do so in the 2nd inning. But he can shorten Urias's day with a go-ahead home run, only to have Adam Duvall go back-to-back with him. It was the first time the Braves had ever hit B2B homers against the Dodgers in a postseason matchup, but the second time they did it at Chavez Ravine this year. Jorge Soler and Freddie Freeman hit them on August 30... off Julio Urias.

Speaking of Freeman, he then homers to start the 3rd, which will make Urias the second pitcher in Dodgers postseason history to give up 8 hits and 3 homers in a game. Don Newcombe did it in the opener of the 1955 World Series, although that one turned out okay for Brooklyn. With 2 outs, Rosario sends another ball down the right-field line which clangs off the bullpen door, then off Mookie Betts's foot, all the while allowing Rosario to scamper to third with a triple. So he's got "the hardest two" out of the way. In the 5th Rosario will get the easiest one, and also effectively knock Urias out of the game. He dumps a single into right, sending Ozzie Albies to third, who eventually scores on a sac fly and Urias gets taken out. Already Rosario has joined Fred McGriff as the only Braves to homer, triple, and single in a postseason game; Crime Dog did it in the Game 7 blowout of the Cardinals in 1996-- and required three different pitchers to serve them up.

Pitcher Justin Bruihl gets to face one batter in the 7th. He has one job. Don't give up a double to Eddie Rosario. Usually here we would say, guess what he does. And no, he struck Rosario out. So we get a little while longer to search old notebooks and contact lists to see if anyone still has Brock Holt's number. You may remember Holt as being the only player ever to hit for the cycle in a postseason game when he did it in the Division Series against the Yankees three years ago. By the time Rosario faces Tony Gonsolin in the 9th, the score is already 6-2 and the last bit of suspense is "will he or won't he".

No, he won't. He does take Gonsolin to right field with a ball that looks promising at first. If only he had lowered that famous "launch angle" by a point or two. At 23° it does not clang off the bullpen door this time, it clears it by about three feet. Now, we can think of a couple ways to still make this a double. Rosario could have just stopped at second and wandered off the field. (Think Robin Ventura "grand-slam single".) He could have intentionally missed third base as well and asked the Dodgers to appeal for him. Ozzie Albies, who's ahead of him, could have also stopped between second and third and let Rosario be called out for passing him. (Albies would still be allowed to score since there's only one out.)

Alas, none of these things happened. What did happen is that Rosario joined Steve Garvey (1978 NLCS) as the only players in postseason history with 2 homers and a triple in the same game. Garvey did not do that at Dodger Stadium, however, he did it in Philadelphia. The only other player to do it at Chavez Ravine-- regular season included-- is Marlon Anderson against the Padres on September 18, 2006. Only one other postseason batter had collected 12 total bases in a game without them coming from 3 homers: Hideki Matsui in the 19-8 game in the 2004 ALCS.

And remember those 4 hits Rosario had in Game 2? The only other player with multiple 4-hit games in the same postseason series is Robin Yount in the 1982 World Series. And only one other Braves batter had ever had a 4-hit, 4-RBI game at Dodger Stadium-- backup catcher Biff Pocoroba on June 9, 1982.

You've Got A Friend

So in Game 4 Eddie Rosario did that. We have no idea whether he had a friendly chat with Chris Taylor overnight, or whether Taylor stole Rosario's bat or water bottle or something, but in Game 5 it was Taylor who said, hold my beer.

Before we get to that, however, we must muddle through more Dodgers pitching woes. Joe Kelly, of 48 appearances but only 44 innings in the regular season, gets tabbed to start another "bullpen game" despite the fact that Los Angeles is down 3 games to 1. Chances are he wasn't going to face more than five or six batters anyway. The unexpected part is getting hurt and coming out of the game after giving up a 2-run homer to Freddie Freeman. The Braves' last multi-run homer in the 1st inning of a postseason game came off the bat of Ryan Klesko in the 1997 NLCS against Florida. And Kelly became the first Dodgers starter not to finish the 1st inning of a playoff game since Bob Welch in the 1981 World Series (Welch faced four batters and all of them reached).

We already know the Braves will return to Atlanta after this game. The Dodgers' prospects for going with them are diminishing. They're down 2-0 and facing the usually-dependable Max Fried. Who, um, gives up two homers in the 2nd. The latter, to Taylor, is a 2-run lead-flipping shot that also scores Albert Pujols, given a chance to start in what could be his final major-league game. Taylor adds another RBI in the 3rd, and by the 5th, Fried is, well, pretty fried. His 90th pitch serves to walk Pujols and get to that precipice known as "the third time through the order". So off he goes in favor of Chris Martin. Who begins by facing Chris Taylor and not having a friend. (In case you missed the James Taylor reference in the header.) Taylor lofts his second homer of the day to make it 6-2. He's already the first batter in Dodgers postseason history to have 5 RBI in a game where they faced elimination. And as you might know, he's not done.

Dylan Lee is on the mound for the 7th when Taylor does it again. This creates a fun list of all the players to hit 3 homers and have 6 RBI in a postseason game. Because you've heard about the other two just in this post. Enrique Hernandez, who will also not be playing in the World Series this year, did it for the Dodgers in 2017 NLCS 5. And the first guy to do it... hit right in front of Taylor. It's current Dodger Albert Pujols, then a Cardinal, in 2011 WS 3. The addition of the single gave Taylor 13 total bases, topping Hernandez's Dodgers record for that. And speaking of Pujols, by getting on ahead of Taylor, he became the third-oldest player to have multiple hits and multiple runs scored in a postseason game, after the ageless Julio Franco (45 in 2003) and a 42-year-old Pete Rose in the 1983 NLCS.

The Dodgers are now up 7-2, doesn't appear we'll have to play the bottom of the 9th, we can start doing all our notes on Taylor because there's no way he bats again. That would require the Dodgers sending seven batters to the plate and scoring even more runs and of course they did. Jacob Webb starts the inning by giving up three straight singles. And before you can say Albert Pujols, it is A.J. Pollock's turn to steal the limelight. Because he hits a 3-run bomb to make it 11-2 and guarantee that Taylor bats again. Recall that Pollock drove in the Dodgers' first run back in the 2nd. So he has also hit multiple homers, something only two other sets of teammates have done in the postseason. Fernando Tatis Jr and Wil Myers did it in last year's Wild Card series for the Padres, and you've probably heard of the first pair who ever did it. Naturally it's Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig against the Cubs in the 1932 World Series. Only two Dodgers pairs have ever had 3 hits, 3 runs, and 4 RBI in the same game: Cody Bellinger and Yasiel Puig on September 15, 2018; and Gil Hodges and Billy Cox on June 12, 1949.

Taylor, as the last Dodgers batter of the evening, is going to strike out to keep at least one postseason record intact for another day. (There's never been a 4-homer game in the playoffs, if you were wondering.) Well, two more days. Because the Dodgers will indeed be following the Braves back to the ATL.

Pitch Perfect

So if defense (pitching) wins championships, does the lack of it lose them? Eventually the Dodgers' woes were just too much, between trying to piece together multiple bullpen games and suffering some early injuries. Their best chance to stay in the series and force a Game 7 was to send Walker Buehler back out on short rest. You know, the Buehler who gave up 4 runs and didn't get out of the 4th back in Game 3. For Game 6 he... um... at least did finish the 4th? He didn't come out for the 5th. And oh yeah, he gave up 4 runs again.

At first it looked like Eddie Rosario might steal this one too, with his third leadoff hit of the series. That joins Gerald Williams (1999), Marquis Grissom (twice), Otis Nixon (1992), and Lonnie Smith (1991) in Braves lore. But he's erased on a double play, which means that back-to-back doubles from Ozzie Albies and Austin Riley only end up scoring 1 run. It was the first time the Braves hit multiple doubles in the 1st inning of a playoff game since 1996 when Mark Lemke and Chipper Jones connected off the Cardinals' Todd Stottlemyre. Buehler gives up more hits in the 2nd and 3rd but strands everybody. Meanwhile, Ian Anderson is keeping the Dodgers in check until they manufacture a run in the 4th. So it's 1-1 and we asked if you liked nail-biters. It's not quite a Game 7, but this is starting to feel like it's going to turn on one big play late.

Except Eddie Rosario's still here. That one big play is the one that does in both Buehler and the Dodgers' season, and it's in the 4th. After a 2-out walk and a pinch-hit double by Ehire Adrianza, Rosario smacks a 3-run homer for a 4-1 lead, his 14th hit of the series (breaking Javy Lopez's team record from the 1996 NLCS), and the first go-ahead 3- or 4-run dinger in Braves history in a potential series-winner. Buehler gets that last out of the 4th, but now the Dodgers have to come back against a fairly-rested Braves bullpen after Max Fried went 5 innings and then there was an off-day. A.J. Minter, six up six down. Meanwhile, it could have gotten worse in the 6th when Alex Vesia takes over for that famous "third time through the order" and proceeds to walk the bases loaded. He's the first Dodgers pitcher to face 3+ batters and walk all of them since Jim Gott did it in Houston on May 21, 1991. But Blake Treinen gets out of that jam and now it is Luke Jackson's turn to pitch for Atlanta.

You remember Luke Jackson. He also pitched in Game 3 behind Buehler. He's the one who gave up 4 runs and got the loss, which is one (of many) reason this series is still going on. Let's see how he's going to fare this time. Double by Chris Taylor (it's not a homer, so progress?). Walks Cody Bellinger, his nemesis from Game 3. RBI double to A.J. Pollock. Welp, suddenly it's 4-2, Jackson has gotten nobody out, and the Dodgers have the tying runs on second and third. For Tyler Matzek this can either go very well or very badly. If badly, the Braves still live to play a Game 7. Or,...

If this was Eddie Rosario's series, it was Tyler Matzek's One Shining Moment. Albert Pujols, 4-pitch strikeout. Pinch hitter Steven Souza, called out on 4 pitches. Mookie Betts, called-called-swing. Matzek just entered the game with second and third and nobody out and struck out three straight without allowing a run. A handful of other pitchers in postseason history have done that. Partial credit to John Rocker for having three such strikeouts in Game 1 of the 1999 World Series, but he allowed a hit in the middle that scored the first run and simply reloaded the bases. But nobody's ever had an inning like Matzek's in the 7th or later. And certainly not one that essentially sealed a series win.

Matzek returned for the 8th and blew through the bottom of the Dodgers order. He thus became the first pitcher in Braves postseason history to throw 2+ perfect innings and get a win in a clincher. Then Will Smith threw a perfect 9th for the save. Remember how last season's NLCS ended? (It's okay if you don't.) With a Dodgers pitcher retiring 9 straight Braves to close out a 4-3 win in Game 7. That guy... was Julio Urias. Just another way we've flipped the script.

And by the way, since the LCS round was added in 1969, there have been 15 previous LCS losers who went on to win it (and advance to the World Series) the following year. But before the Braves and Astros of 2020-21, it had never been done by BOTH leagues in the same season.

Does that mean we see Dodgers-Red Sox in the World Series in 2022? (Or, because we already saw that in 2018, does this indicate we've reached the back end of a double-flip?) You, and 28 other teams, will just have to wait for '22 to unfold. For now, though, the Braves and Astros have (we hope) seven more games to play. On to the final round!

Rivalry Week

No, we haven't taken up covering college basketball. But through all the twists and turns of the 2021 regular season, a bunch of those teams who love to hate each other ended up in the postseason-- when it actually matters.

The Yanks Are Going

We profess to having had a bit of schadenfreude right after the All-Star break when the MLB (and TV) schedulers decided to plop a lone Yankees/Red Sox game on that Thursday so it would be the only game in the country and they could hype it even more... and then it got rained out.

In the postseason, however, the hype when these two play each other is more justified. Especially when it's not even a 5- or 7-game series between the rivals. Nope, this is a single winner-take-all game to decide who moves on in/to the postseason. This is for all the Tostitos.

There had been five previous such games between the Yanks and Sawx; they played regular-season tiebreakers in 1949 and 1978 (the latter is "The Bucky [expletive] Dent Game"). When the Wild Card came along, we suddenly had the potential for two teams from the same division to meet in an official postseason game, which of course happened between those two in 2003 ("Aaron [expletive] Boone") and again in 2004.

Eighteen years hence, some fans were again yelling "Aaron [expletive] Boone" at the conclusion of such a game. Except this time it was the Yankees faithful. Because you might have heard that Aaron Boone is now their manager. And he's going to be sitting around his office (or cleaning it out, maybe?) while watching the remainder of the 2021 postseason.

If you needed a starter for a winner-take-all game, you could do a lot worse than Gerrit Cole. He's started 13 prior postseason game, including three for the Yankees last year, won eight of them, and always made it to at least the 5th or 6th inning before running out of gas. But if you've followed him this season, it's been a very different second half. The batting average against him went from .203 to .255, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio went from nearly 7 down to 5. Meanwhile, here's Xander Bogaerts.

After Cole walked Rafael Devers, "X" sent the Fenway faithful into a frenzy from which they would not emerge. His 2-run homer was just the fourth multi-run shot in the 1st inning of a postseason game against the Yankees, and also the fourth 1st-inning homer (any number of runs) for the Sawx in a WTA game. David Ortiz off Kevin Brown, in that 2004 ALCS we already mentioned, is on both lists. The others against the Yankees were J.D. Martinez off J.A. Happ in 2018 ALDS 1 and John Valentin off Roger Clemens in 1999 ALCS 3. The other 1st-inning homers were Dustin Pedroia against the Rays in 2008 ALCS 7, and Nomar Garciaparra in 1999 ALDS 5 against Cleveland.

Still, though, plenty of time. Until Kyle Schwarber leads off the 3rd with another dinger, joining Troy O'Leary as the only players ever to hit a postseason homer for both the Red Sox and Cubs. Cole gives up another single, walks Devers again, and then exits after only 6 outs. Luis Severino, in the 2017 Wild Card game, and Ivan Nova, in 2011 ALDS 5 against Detroit, are the only other Yankees starters to give up 2 homers and not get out of the 3rd inning in a WTA game. And Cole is the first Yankees starter to give up 2 homers and get 6 or fewer outs at Fenway Park since Andy Hawkins did it on September 1, 1990. (That's not his 4-run no-hitter, obviously, but it's exactly 2 months later.)

On the other side, Nate Eovaldi was confounding the Yankee hitters, striking out 8 of them before Anthony Rizzo finally got hold of a ball in the 6th. That tied the Red Sox record for K's in a WTA game; Jon Lester fanned 8 Rays in the final game of the 2008 ALCS, and Pedro Martinez did it twice.

This game also featured the escapades of multiple third-base coaches. Shortly after Rizzo's homer, Phil Nevin tried to send Aaron Judge all the way from first on what would ultimately be a classic Fenway Park single after bouncing off the wall in left-center. Judge, naturally, was thrown out easily to end the Yankees rally. Then, an inning later, Carlos Febles does the reverse and tries to stop Enrique Hernandez and set up bases loaded with two outs. Hernandez ignores him, runs the stop sign, and scores what would be Boston's final run of the game. You may be aware that Nevin and Febles, like many current coaches, both played in the majors themselves. And it turns out these two overlapped for six seasons from 1998-2003. In that time, the number of outs they made on the basepaths was exactly equal (25). Advantage back to Nevin?

By the way, that Alex Verdugo single on which Hernandez scored also came with the bases loaded, and thanks to running the stop sign, it scored two runs instead of just one. The only other multi-run bases-loaded single in the 7th or later of a Red Sox postseason game was by Rico Petrocelli off Will McEnaney of the Reds in the opener of the 1975 World Series.

The Yankees would end the game-- and their season-- on a strikeout by Anthony Rizzo, their 11th of the game against 0 walks. They'd only done that twice before in a postseason contest-- and they won those other games (2012 ALDS 3 vs Orioles, 1949 WS 1 vs Dodgers). They'd only had one other such game at Fenway Park, against John Lackey on April 23, 2014. Rizzo joined A-Rod (twice), Jorge Posada (2007), and Willie Randolph (1980) as the "lucky" batters to eliminate the Yankees from a postseason with a whiff.

Wild: Cards

Much like with Gerrit Cole, if you have the opportunity to start Max Scherzer in a winner-take-all game, you really should do it. The Dodgers and their 106 wins still had to get through a one-game playoff with the 90-win Cardinals and make a lot of commentators write things about seedings and how a third- or fourth-place team from a really good division might lose out to a "champion" from a really bad division. But here we are, and for a brief moment, it looked like the Cardinals might have gotten to Max. Single, stolen base, walk to start the game. Tommy Edman joined Matt Carpenter (2013), Tony Womack (2004), and Vince Coleman (1985) in snagging a leadoff hit in a postseason game at Dodger Stadium. With 1 out Edman scores on a wild pitch, the first run-scoring WP in a 1st inning in Dodgers postseason history. Then presumably the coffee kicks in and Scherzer remembers where he is-- on the mound to start a WTA game for the fourth time. That trails only Roger Clemens and Gerrit Cole, who matched Clemens with his fifth such start yesterday. He gets two flyouts and then shuts down the Cardinals until the 5th.

Meanwhile, who's right behind Scherzer in a big bunch of pitchers to start three WTA games? Why that's Adam Wainwright. He gets through 3 innings unscathed despite allowing a leadoff single to Mookie Betts, who tied Davey Lopes for the most leadoff hits (7) in Dodgers postseason history. The NLWC also marked the 24th time the Dodgers and Cardinals had met in a postseason game, but the first of those where both teams began the game with a base hit. Waino escaped the 3rd when Trea Turner grounded into a double play with the bases loaded, the first time the Dodgers have done that since Russell Martin in 2008 NLCS 4 against the Phillies.

By the 6th, however, Waino and Max are both gone and we are knotted at 1-1 after Justin Turner homered to lead off the 4th. And for the last four frames we didn't have a single 1-2-3 inning. Tommy Edman got a third hit and a second stolen base, joining Edgar Renteria (2000) and Lou Brock (twice) on the list of Cardinals to do that in a postseason game. Harrison Bader got hit by a pitch twice, which no Cardinal had ever had happen in a PS game before.

And when Albert Pujols came out to pinch hit to start the 9th, well, the collective heartbeats of baseball writers everywhere seemed to stop. We remember all those great years Pujols had with the Cardinals. Is it remotely possible he could suddenly eliminate them from the postseason with one swing, now batting for the Dodgers? He's never had a postseason walkoff anything, much less a home run (which would be needed here).

Annnnd he still doesn't. Lined to center. [Sound of deflating balloon.] But that just paves the way for Chris Taylor to be the hero. A 2-out walk to Cody Bellinger keeps the Dodgers' inning alive. And four pitches later the Cardinals' season is dead when Taylor does this. If you're thinking Kirk Gibson or Max Muncy, that's fine, but those weren't WTA games. No Dodgers batter had ever hit any walkoff in one of those before. Even a go-ahead hit in the 8th or later of a WTA had only been done by one other Dodger in history, Rick Monday in 1981 NLCS 5 at Montréal.

There is one Kirk Gibson connection, however. Chris Taylor came in as part of a double-switch for the pitcher to start the 7th inning. So he hit a walkoff homer for the Dodgers in a game he didn't start. The last Dodgers batter to do that against the Cardinals in any game was none other than Dusty Baker on September 5, 1981. And when it comes to the postseason, against any team, well, yes, Gibson is the only other Dodgers batter to ever do that.

ALCS No. 5

Since the introduction of the second Wild Card and the elimination games between them, it's been touted as a "reward" for winning the division. You get three or even four days off to reset your lineup and pitching staff while those "underlings" (even if they have 106 wins of their own) battle it out for the "right" to face you. Or you could be one of those middle two teams who both get the days off and don't even care who wins the Wild Card games because it doesn't matter. We give you the other team with which Gerrit Cole wrote his postseason legacy, the Houston Astros.

In 2005 the Astros and White Sox faced off in a World Series that did not go very well for Houston. Chicago swept that Fall Classic 4-0 for its first title in 88 years, just one season after the Red Sox had broken their own, more-famous, 86-year drought. Here in 2021 they're facing off again as division champions, thanks to the MLB realignment in 2013 that flipped the Astros from the NL Central into the AL West. And you might have heard that the Astros keep appearing in the postseason ever since. And the Division Series round is kinda quaint because they keep, um, "trashing" whoever they play.

Lance Lynn found his way to the mound in Game 1 for the White Sox. It would be the 4th inning when he found his way to the showers. Two singles and a walk started the scoring in the 2nd, but another walk, a failed fielder's choice, and a double by Yordan Alvarez would leave him on the hook for 3 runs in the 3rd, and then three hits in the 4th were the last (Myles) Straw. Lynn joined Dallas Keuchel (2020), Early Wynn (1959), and Eddie Cicotte (1919) as the only White Sox starters to give up 5 runs in a postseason game without finishing the 4th inning. Yordan's leadoff homer in the 6th was the Astros' 6th and final run; he became the second Houstonian with 2 XBH and 2 RBI in a postseason game against the White Sox. Jason Lane did it in Game 3 of that previously-mentioned 2005 World Series.

Lucas Giolito, who you may remember as throwing a no-hitter last year for the White Sox, got the honors in Game 2. This time he took a no-hitter all the way to... uh... the 2nd inning. He did become the first pitcher in White Sox postseason history to strike out the first three opposing batters of a game. Except Giolito also issued five walks and was already at 90 pitches by the time he got taken out in the 5th. He's the first Sox postseason starter to issue that many free passes without getting through the 5th, and combined with Lynn getting pulled in the 4th in Game 1, the first time the Sox had ever had their first two starters of a series leave that early.

As you would expect, this is leading to another Houston victory. But not before Framber Valdez got in some trouble in the top half of the 5th and let in 3 runs. When the last of Giolito's walks finally scored, it left us knotted at 4-4 with neither starter involved in the decision. So for the Sox this is setting up to be a Bummer. That is unfortunately-named relief pitcher Aaron, who got the ball for the 7th and promptly gave up three singles. Craig Kimbrel was pressed into service a little earlier than usual, and Carlos Correa smoked him for a double. Two pitches later, Kyle Tucker polishes it off with a homer for your final score of 9-4. The pairing of Bummer and Kimbrel is the first in White Sox postseason history to each give up 2 runs while getting 2 outs in the same game. And unfortunately there aren't a lot of Astros-related notes here, because as mentioned, they've been here every year lately. Even the 5 runs in the 7th inning happened three years ago in Cleveland.

And even though the White Sox lost Game 2, they did collect 11 hits. Part of the reason they lost is that every one of those hits was a single. The last team to do that in a postseason game was the 2008 Brewers. And if you remembered anything about Game 1, you may know that all seven Sox hits in that game were singles as well. Only one other team in postseason history had collected 7+ hits in consecutive games with all of them being singles; the Tigers did it against the Red Sox in the 2013 ALCS. And Tim Anderson had three of those 11 in Game 2, the fourth time he's had 3 hits in a postseason game for the Sox. That surpasses Shoeless Joe Jackson for the most in team history.

Game 3 featured another offensive outburst, but suddenly we're back in Chicago and the exploding scoreboard is in favor of the White Sox. There's one school of thought that says the Astros are up 2-0, go for the dagger and the sweep and four more days off. Except the Astros are without Justin Verlander, and Gerrit Cole's already pitched this week (for the Yankees). Luis Garcia had a very good regular season regardless of which stats you use, but he did not have a very good Game 3. Tim Anderson started the game with another of those pesky singles en route to his fifth 3-hit postseason game. But here's where we point out that Sox starter Dylan Cease didn't have a very good Game 3 either. In fact he had to Cease pitching in the 2nd inning after 3 walks, a 2-run double to Kyle Tucker, and an RBI single from Jake Meyers. Tucker's double was only the second one in Astros postseason history (any inning) that flipped a lead, since they usually do that with homers. Marwin Gonzalez had the other against Cleveland in the 2018 ALDS. Granted, managers have much quicker hooks these days, especially with 13 and 14 pitchers on the team, but Cease became the third starter in Sox history to only get 5 outs in a potential elimination game. Dane Dunning did it in the Wild Card round last year, and we're pretty sure the other doesn't count. Lefty Williams "mysteriously" gave up 4 runs to the Reds in the final game of the 1919 World Series.

Luis Garcia at least made it to the 3rd before his wheels fell off. Walk, strikeout, home run by Yasmani Grandal to get the Sox back to 5-3. Groundout. Two more singles. Then we all get invited to the Garcia family reunion. The batter is now Leury Garcia who struck out his first time up. Luis throws two pitches way out of the zone to Leury. And, in a very-rare mid-at-bat pitching change (so rare we couldn't verify exactly how many had occurred in the postseason), Dusty Baker decides he's had enough. And the call to the bullpen goes out for... Yimi Garcia. Which of course broke baseball Twitter almost as badly as when Will Smith homered off of Will Smith last October. Predictably, yes, Leury is the first Garcia to face two other Garciae in the same at-bat (regular season or post-), which means he's also the first one to homer off either of them. (Maybe should've left Luis out there to just walk him.) That gives the game back to the Sox, and Leury hits the fourth lead-flipping homer in their postseason history. Happily none of the others was by a Garcia; they're Dewayne Wise in 2008 and both Tadahito Iguchi and Paul Konerko in 2005 (the latter in Game 2 of that World Series against Houston).

Yimi ended up with his own problems in the 4th, giving up three straight singles and forcing Zack Greinke to enter the game in the middle of an inning. He hadn't done that since he was with the Royals on August 20, 2007, also against the Sox. And his first batter is going to teach us all about "runner's lane interference". Once in a very long while, someone at a game will ask about that second, shorter line as you near first base. And it's tricky to explain. But the batter's supposed to stay over there so that the defense has the opportunity to make a play on him from anywhere in fair terrirory. So was Yasmani Grandal running on the grass for at least part of way to first? Yes. Was that legal? Ehhhh, maybe. Does it matter? Nope. Like we say, the purpose of the rule is that the ball's in fair territory (or else the batter wouldn't be running), so the defense gets ample opportunity to make a play on him. On him. Not on another runner, which is what happened. So when Abreu is throwing to the plate and hits Grandal with the ball, the rule book basically says, oops. There was a little argument about whether Grandal "leaned into it" or deflected the throw intentionally, in which case, yes, he could have been called out. But that is ultimately the go-ahead run and the turning point in our game. The Sox roll on to five more unanswered runs and a 12-6 win to force a Game 4 on Monday. The only other postseason game where the South Siders collected a dozen runs was a 14-2 win over Boston in the 2005 ALDS.

Ah yes, Game 4 on Monday. Add one to the conspiracies about the league office helping out the Astros. In the postseason, MLB brass, not the home team or the umpires, decides whether games will be played (or resumed in case of a delay). At 11:25 am, over 3 hours before first pitch and 1 hour before the gates were set to open, came the edict that it was going to rain all afternoon and we were going to play on Tuesday instead. And we're sure the White Sox would not have done that on their own, because instead of facing Jose Urquidy in an elimination game, the extra day off gives the ball to (gulp) Lance McCullers. It also deprives us of one final postseason day with four baseball games.

Did the extra day hurt Carlos Rodon? We may never know, but the Sox ace hadn't pitched in a real game in over two weeks. It had been more than a month since he'd thrown 70 pitches in any outing. So while McCullers took care of the White Sox, the Astros offense took care of Rodon. Jose Altuve got hit by a pitch, and just as the radio broadcast is saying that he "doesn't run like he used to", he swipes second. That's not going to matter because Rodon walks the next two batters and then gives up a double to Carlos Correa. Moral: Don't pitch to Correa in Game 4. He had a lead-flipping hit (a home run) against Oakland in last year's ALDS 4, and the only other batter in Astros postseason history with multiple lead-flipping hits is George Springer.

That 1 run that the White Sox already had was on a homer by Gavin Sheets, who later doubled to join Ted Kluszewski (1959) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (1919) as the only players to do both in a game where the team got eliminated. It did take them a record 4 hours 32 minutes to get eliminated, the longest 9-inning game in White Sox history, mainly because the already-depleted bullpen (remember the short starts in the first two games?) couldn't stop giving up runs. Michael Kopech was charged with three even through Garrett Crochet gave up the important hit. Craig Kimbrel was used in the 8th and gave up an unearned one. And in the 9th Liam Hendriks couldn't just get it over with. Jose Altuve drills a 3-run homer to make the scoreboard look even worse at 10-1. It also gives Altuve some history, at least until he breaks his own mark again next week. He's the first leadoff batter in team history to score 4 runs in a postseason game. He's also the second leadoff batter for any team to score 4 runs and have 3 RBI in a postseason game; Len Dykstra did that for the Phillies in the famous 15-14 game with Toronto in 1993. And that bomb was Altuve's 19th postseason homer, tying Springer's team mark and putting him in a fourth-place tie among all players (granted, there are more rounds now, so the list is quite recent).

Whoever gets to play the Astros in the Division Series next year, be prepared. We mentioned they keep dominating this round. If your postseason bracket has their logo burned into the ALCS spot, it's because they've been it for five seasons in a row now. In 52 seasons of LCS play, the only other team to appear in five straight was the Braves of 1995-99.

Milwaukee's Best

Cue the segue to the Braves of 2021. They'll be in the LCS again too, though only for a second straight year. But to set up their rematch with the Dodgers starting on Saturday, they had to give a farewell wave to Milwaukee. It's not the first time they've done that.

Braves/Brewers hasn't really emerged as a big "rivalry", but they do share the distinction of being the only two Milwaukee-based MLB teams in the past 100 years. So it's fun that the first two games of their first-ever postseason meeting were played in Milwaukee.

It was five weeks ago when Corbin Burnes started, and Josh Hader, finished, the Brewers' second-ever no-hitter. Appropriately enough, this series is going to start with Corbin Burnes and end with Josh Hader. They will both give up hits this time, although Burnes managed to get into the 5th inning again in Game 1. The longest no-hitter in Brewers postseason history belongs to Moose Haas in the 1982 ALCS. But the second- and now third-longest belong to Burnes; he also got into the 5th in the opener of their 2018 Division Series with Colorado. He will end up being the first pitcher in Brewers postseason history (which admittedly isn't very long) to throw 6+ scoreless innings and allow only 2 hits.

Meanwhile, Charlie Morton has picked up where he left off in September, allowing the Brewers only 3 hits and striking out 9. He posted that line eight times during the regular season; the only other Braves pitcher in the modern era to have nine such games in a year is Mike Foltynewicz in 2018. And if you think that means not much happened in Game 1, you're right-- at least until the 7th inning. Was Morton out there "one batter too long"? You could make that case. Or even two. He plunked Avisail Garcia to start things. Four pitches later, Rowdy Tellez yanks a 2-run homer to center. Did we mention it's a 0-0 tie before that? That's a multi-run go-ahead homer in the 7th or later; the only other one in Brewers postseason history was by Ted Simmons off Tommy John in the special Division Series played 40 years ago because of the strike. Those would be the only 2 runs the Brewers would need as well; that same ALDS in 1981 also features the other postseason game where the Brewers had 5 hits and won.

The Braves did not go down without one last "chop", however. That came from Joc Pederson in the 8th after Burnes had been pinch-hit for. Like Kyle Schwarber earlier in the week, Pederson has now hit a postseason homer for two iconic teams, the Dodgers and Braves. The only other player with that pair is Rafael Furcal. And here's where our Milwaukee factoids get fun. We mentioned this is the first postseason meeting between the Braves and Brewers. Which means the last time that the Braves played a postseason game in Wisconsin... yep, they were the home team. It was Game 7 of the 1958 World Series against the Yankees. And that game is both the last time they lost a PS game in Milwaukee and the last time they hit a PS home run there. Joc Pederson bridged a gap of 63 years minus 1 day to Del Crandall off Bob Turley on October 9, 1958.

Outside of Burnes, we dare say that neither the Brewers nor Braves have any nationally-known "big name" pitchers that you heard about all season. Of course they're all big names to their own fanbases, but the only others you may know something about are Brandon Woodruff and Max Fried. Naturally they squared off in Game 2 and threw us another pitcher's duel. Both of them went 6 innings (earning a "quality start" as the stat used to be known), and the only time either of them faced more than 4 batters in a frame was... ew, yeah. That would be the top of the 3rd which started with Fried striking out because pitchers are mysteriously still batting. But then it's back to the top of the order and Woodruff wasn't fooling them. Jorge Soler double. Freddie Freeman single to score him. Ozzie Albies double to score Freddie. Since it's our last chance at one of these, that double was the first RBI two-bagger for the Braves in a postseason game in Milwaukee since... yep, but this time it's 1957. Johnny Logan drove in a run against Bob Grim of the Yankees in the bottom of the 10th. Grim was not grim, however, because the Yankees had scored 2 in their half and Logan's double was not a walkoff.

Austin Riley added one last insurance run with a solo homer in the 6th, giving us the first Braves batter with 2 hits and at least 1 RBI in a postseason game in Milwaukee since Hank Aaron in 1958. But those 3 runs were more than enough with Fried busy mowing down Brewers. He recorded 9 strikeouts, joining Ian Anderson (2020) and Steve Avery (1991) as the only Braves pitchers with a 0-run, 9-K win in the postseason. Meanwhile, how many Brewers pitchers have struck out 7+ in a postseason game and lost? One-- Brandon Woodruff. But get this, he's done it three times now, the others in their series losses to the Dodgers in both 2018 and 2020. All told Game 2 was the ninth home game in Brewers history (either stadium) where they scored 0 runs and struck out 14 times; three of them were this year. The last Braves shutout in Milwaukee was-- no, no, they weren't the home team. But it was in the first series of 2014, a 1-0 game behind Aaron Harang.

So the teams with the star pitchers (Astros and White Sox) are slugging their way to 9-4 and 12-6 finals, and the teams with lesser-known folks are combining for 6 runs in two games. Postseason baseball, everyone. Since we spent time looking this up, it had been four seasons since Games 1 and 2 of a series each finished with 3 runs or fewer. And that previous one has already come up; it was the 2017 ALCS, the first one in Houston's run, when they had just gotten Justin Verlander and the Yankees still had CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka. But now it's on to Game 3, back in Atlanta, and surely one of these offenses will bust out. It's Freddy Peralta and Ian Anderson on the hill, again good enough to be big-league starters, but neither of them's blowing fastballs past you at 98.

Postseason baseball, everyone. Neither of them gave up a run either. The only issue here is length. Peralta only went 4 innings, even less than his season average of 5.16. Peralta could have landed a top-10 spot in the ERA list this season but didn't throw the required 162 innings (1 per team game) to qualify. (The aforementioned Lance Lynn, also in that category.) On the other side, Anderson needs 84 pitches to get through 5 and qualify for a win (except it's tied), and he only escapes the 5th because Luis Urias forgets he's not forced on a grounder to third and gets caught in a mini-rundown. And if you're wondering how Anderson could qualify for a win when the game is tied, well, leave that to Joc Pederson again.

Adrian Houser has replaced Peralta for the bottom of the 5th, and immediately surrenders singles to Travis d'Arnaud and Dansby Swanson. Which means Pederson is about to replace that 0 on the scoreboard with a 3. It's the second 3- or 4-run pinch-hit homer in postseason history to break a 0-0 tie; the other was by Ben Francisco of the Phillies in 2011. Recall that Joc also had a pinch-hit homer in Game 1 for the Braves' only run. He's the first player in Braves postseason history to hit multiple pinch-hit homers, and just the third for any team to do it in the same series. The others on that list are Bernie Carbo of the Red Sox in 1975, and Chuck Essegian for the 1959 Dodgers. In between, Joc also pinch-hit when Max Fried left Game 2 and recorded a single. He is thus the first player in postseason history to pinch-hit in three straight games of the same series and get hits in all of them. There are two players (Jose Martinez in 2019 and Allen Craig in 2011) who have done it in three straight in a season, but they were both split across multiple rounds.

That 3 would once again be all the Braves needed to secure a win. The bullpen even came up solid behind Anderson, with four pitchers throwing an inning each and the only threat being Eduardo Escobar's leadoff double in the 7th. It's the first time that the Braves have ever shut out the Brewers in back-to-back games, and the last time they even did it twice in a season was 2014.

So is Joc your hero again in Game 4? Well, not as a pinch hitter because he's starting this time against lefty Eric Lauer. He does get an honorable mention in the 5th inning for grounding out with the bases loaded. Not something you usually mention honorably, but this came with 1 out and the Braves down by 2 runs (again). Pederson managed to beat the relay throw that would have gotten the Brewers defense out of the inning. So instead of a GIDP, Pederson "settles" for an RBI groundout but keeps the inning going. And then Travis d'Arnaud singles in the tying run which will set up our real heroics later.

The reason the Braves were down by 2 at that point was another multi-run homer by Rowdy Tellez. Recall that he drove in both Brewers runs in the Game 1 victory. The only other player in Brewers postseason history to hit two multi-run, go-ahead homers is Ryan Braun, and his weren't both in the same series. But of course, the real Rowdy-ness down in The Battery happened in the 8th. We told you this series, like the no-hitter, would end with Josh Hader on the mound. Presumably he's going to go 2 innings and hope the Brewers come up with a run in the 9th to force a Game 5. Hader predictably strikes out the first two Braves batters. That's what he does. As Freddie Freeman strolls to the plate, Braves radio casually mentions that he hit a walkoff homer against Hader back on May 18, 2019. And then very. first. pitch. Freeman joins Eugenio Suarez of the Reds as the only players ever to hit multiple go-ahead homers off Hader. It's the first go-ahead homer in the 8th or later of any game in which the Braves clinched a postseason series. Freeman is the fifth player to homer and also double at any point in such a game, after Paul Bako (2001 NLDS), Javy Lopez (1996 NLCS), David Justice (1995 WS, he WAS the 1-0 final), and Brian Hunter (1991 NLCS). And while it may be the first go-ahead homer in the 8th or later of a clincher, it's also just the franchise's second hit in such a situation. The other is, in our humble opinion, up there with the best announcer calls in baseball history. You know it as The Sid Bream Play.

For licensing-type reasons, we usually only link official videos from MLB or the teams. But the best part of Harry Caray's call is after Bream crosses the plate, and MLB cut that part out. So no video on this one, but extended audio intermission!

The Postseason Rules!

Yeah, sure, you knew what Rule 5.05(a)(8) was before this series. We'll allow partial credit if you knew the rule but not the actual citation. We had to look it up (quickly) too. But the Rays/Red Sox ALDS is going to be remembered for one play, and it's one we'll get to momentarily. After we memoralize all the other plays that nobody will remember. Except maybe Christian Vazquez.

Randy Arozarena's had plenty of postseason plays to remember in the past two years. He's hit so many homers that he's probably forgotten some of them. So around hitting his 11th one in the bottom of the 5th of Game 1-- extending his own team record-- he added a couple more bits of interesting-ness. He led off the game not with another homer, as happened a lot last year, but with a walk. He's had lots of walks. This was the 73rd of his 3-year career. But it's only the third one in Rays postseason history that led off a series. Austin Meadows got one in 2019 against the Astros, and Akinori Iwamura started their 2008 ALCS, also against Botson, with a free pass. After drawing his 74th career walk in the 7th and finding himself on third later that inning, Aroz just does this. Depending on how many asterisks you want to add, it's the first steal of home in a postseason game since Javy Baez of the Cubs did it in the 2016 NLDS. Baez, however, was sorta forced to try that steal after he took too early a jump and there was a pickoff throw behind him. Marquis Grissom was credited with stealing home in the 1997 ALCS, but that was on a squeeze play where Omar Vizquel missed the bunt. So you can make the argument that Arozarena pulled off the first straight steal of home in a postseason game since Jackie Robinson did it in 1955. Only two other players in postseason history have collected a homer, two walks, any stolen base, and 3 runs scored; the others are Eddie Murray of the 1983 Orioles and Tommie Agee for the 1969 Mets. (Ergo, the Rays are winning the Wor-- oh, wait.)

There's one other play that may make Game 1 memorable, especially for fans (or detractors) of catwalks. And we don't mean the kind you see at Fashion Week or in Right Said Fred videos. We mean the kind that hang from the "ceiling" at Tropicana Field, into which Nelson Cruz mashed a high fly ball in the 3rd inning of this game. Even though it most likely would have left the field on its own, it was ruled, correctly, to have hit "Ring C" and thus result in a "ground-rule home run". (The catwalks are true "ground rules" because they are specific to that park, unlike the universal "a ball that bounces out of play is a double". (Yeah, we're getting there.) The Sawx, meanwhile, just never got anything going against Shane McClanahan, who helped the cause by not issuing a single walk. He became the third Rays pitcher to allow 0 runs, 0 walks, and get a win against Boston, after Blake Snell (August 2020) and Matt Andriese (June 2015). The Red Sox hadn't collected 9+ hits in any game, but had all of them be singles and end up getting shut out, since May 3, 1993, against Seattle.

Let's just say the Sawx would not be getting shut out in Game 2. They guaranteed that early when Xander Bogaerts and Alex Verdugo hit back-to-back RBI singles in the 1st. And hey, we've got Chris Sale starting, he may not be the bonanza 75%-off Black Friday Sale that he once was, but he can still hold his own against a Toyotathon or a Presidents' Day mattress Sale. Let's see how that went. Oof. Single, single, strikeout, walk, single, Jordan Luplow grand slam. So here we go. There's been one other grand slam in Rays postseason history, and the guy who hit it was busy admiring Luplow's. That's Hunter Renfroe in last year's Wild Card series, now stationed in right field for the Sawx. It was, by inning, the earliest slam ever hit by the Rays against Boston; Ben Zobrist held that record with one in the 2nd on July 15, 2011. And because Boston had those 2 runs in the top half, Luplow managed to hit the second lead-flipping slam in the 1st inning of any postseason game in history; Ryan Roberts of Arizona had the other one against Milwaukee's Randy Wolf in 2011 NLDS 4. Sale, meanwhile, joined an illustrious list of Red Sox starters to give up 5 runs and get 3 outs in a postseason game: Bret Saberhagen in the 1999 ALDS against Cleveland, plus Smoky Joe Wood and Buck O'Brien who both did it in the 1912 World Series.

So it's up to the Sawx to climb back into this one, and who better than Bogaerts and Verdugo again? They hit back-to-back homers in the 3rd, Enrique Hernandez ties it with another dinger in the 5th, and then "X" scores ahead of J.D. Martinez's 3-run shot a few batters later. The Red Sox hadn't hit 4 homers in a game at The Trop since September 12, 2015, and it turns out Martinez also had a go-ahead 3-run bomb against the Yankees in Game 1 of their 2018 Division Series. The only other batters in Red Sox postseason history to hit two of those are Troy O'Leary and Manny Ramirez.

The Red Sox now have the lead at 8-5 and you can stop now. Nah, we're gonna have Rafael Devers hit another bomb in the 8th, after Hernandez collects another not-really "ground-rule" double. That's his third two-bagger of the game; he and Albert Pujols (2011 NLCS 2) are the only players in postseason history to do that and also homer in the same game. Only two other teams have ever hit 5 homers in a true postseason "road game" (so, excluding last year's neutral-site affairs). The 1928 Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig did it in St Louis, and appropriately, the A's did it in the 1989 "Earthquake Game".

5.05(a) et seq. list the situations in which the batter and/or runners may advance "without liability to be put out". You know The Play. You've seen The Play. You've read articles about The Play. Here's the play again.

The keyword there is "bounding". Subsection 9 addresses a "fair fly ball" and is the reason that a doink off Jose Canseco's head is a home run, but this is not. Logic being, it's already hit the ground (or something else, in this case the bullpen wall) so would not have been a home run in flight. So, someone asked, why can't every fielder, with a runner on first, just toss the ball into the seats to force that runner to go back to third? Well, no, there's a "spirit of the game" thing there, and much like the Grandal play in the other series, the umpires could award more bases if they thought the interference was intentional. So this was the right call, even if the "bounding" was a bit unconventional, and everyone on the field seemed to know it as well. Oddly enough, it's not the first time the Red Sox have been involved in a fun rules-related incident in a playoff game. It's also not the first time Sam Holbrook has either.

The first 12 (yep, 12!) innings of Game 3 are going to be lost to history. Yeah, Kyle Schwarber hit a leadoff homer for Boston, joining Dustin Pedroia (2007), Johnny Damon (2004), and Patsy Dougherty (1903) as the only ones to do it in Red Sox postseason history. And that didn't even tie the game, because in the top half Austin Meadows took Nate Eovaldi deep. The only other teams we found to score multiple runs in the 1st inning in each of the first three games of a postseason series were the 2002 Athletics and 1989 Cubs.

When not giving up homers, Eovaldi was on his game, recording the first 6 outs of the contest via the K. There have only been six pitchers in postseason history to do that, and if you thought Clemens, Randy, Pedro, or Koufax, you're wrong. Still a good list though: Jacob deGrom (2015), Adam Wainwright (2013), Mike Hampton (2003), Orlando Hernandez (2000), and Jim Palmer (1973).

Our game ended up in the 13th inning due to the efforts of Wander Franco and (who else?) Randy Arozarena in the 8th. Franco's leadoff homer in that inning was just the third hit by the Rays that late in a PS game at Fenway. The other two happened in the same game, when Rocco Baldelli and Carlos Peña took Paul Byrd deep in 2008 ALCS 3. Aroz's double was the third game-tying hit for the Rays in the 8th or later of a postseason game; Ji-Man Choi homered in ALCS 5 last year against Houston, and Peña had a go-ahead single in the 2010 Division Series against Texas.

As we mentioned in the final regular-season post, we might have seen the last of the free-runner rule. [Plays tiny violin.] It's not a thing in the postseason. So it's a battle between Nick Pivetta, who may or may not have been slated to start Game 4 for the Red Sox, and David Robertson who's been around some postseason games in the late innings. They match each other through the 10th, 11th, and 12th before, well, The Play happens in the 13th. After Yandy Diaz gets sent back to third, Pivetta finishes the inning by fanning Mike Zunino, his seventh K of the game. He's going to become the first Sawx pitcher in four decades to throw 4+ innings in relief, strike out 7+, and get a win (Mark Clear, May 27, 1981). Because while everyone is still trying to figure out What Just Happened, Christian Vazquez does this. Yep, that's the first extra-inning walkoff homer in the 13th or later in Red Sox postseason history. The previous record had been held by David Ortiz with his "we'll see you later tonight" homer in the 12th in the 2004 ALCS. "Later tonight" he ended up hitting a blooper to center in the 14th that still keeps its record as the latest Sawx postseason walkoff. And the Red Sox had not hit any multi-run walkoff homer in the 13th or later since Kevin Youkilis went deep against the Cardinals' Mike Parisi on June 22, 2008.

Can you handle one more game? What about one more walkoff? The Rays are now in "all hands on deck" mode trailing the series 2-1, so they toss Collin McHugh out on the mound. He runs through his 2 innings on 18 pitches, but he also hasn't been a full-time starter since 2016 after developing shoulder and then elbow problems. So he's gone by the time the 3rd rolls out. That's back to Game 1 starter Shane McClanahan, who also happens to be on short rest. Not a good combo, unless you're the Red Sox lineup. Which, around two fly-ball outs, goes single, walk, homer, single, double, single, and 5 runs. Incredibly, that's not going to result in a loss.

The Rays gradually climb back into this, with Wander Franco hitting a solo homer in the 6th. You may remember him hitting one in Game 3 also; he's the youngest player NOT named Tony Conigliaro to go deep in consecutive games at Fenway Park (regular season or post-). That was also his seventh hit of the postseason series, something only four other players have done before reaching the age of 21. Those others are Miguel Cabrera (2003), Andruw Jones (1996), Mickey Mantle (1952), and Freddie Lindstrom (1924). Juan Soto would be on this list as well, except he turned 21 in the middle of the 2019 World Series and didn't hit the mark in time.

The Rays come all the way back when Mike Zunino and Kevin Kiermaier hit back-to-back doubles to start the 8th, and then (of course!) Randy Arozarena ties things back up with a single to score KK. McClanahan is thus the first Rays pitcher to give up 5 runs, get 2 outs, and NOT take a loss in a road game since Austin Pruitt did it in Baltimore on July 27, 2018. Those doubles were the third pair ever hit at Fenway by the Rays' #8 and #9 hitters; Brandon Lowe and Ji-Man Choi did it in August, while Josh Paul and Joey Gathright connected back on May 27, 2006. Along the way Austin Meadows also had a 17-pitch at-bat which is the longest known plate appearance in both Rays and postseason history (complete pitch counts only go to 1988, but a few are available before that).

By the 9th the Rays are on pitcher number 8, in the form of J.P. Feyereisen. Who was not exactly on Feyer. Vazquez, the Game 3 hero, starts the inning with a single and gets bunted to second. Travis Shaw singles him to third, at which point Alex Cora decides to pinch-run with the game-winner just 90 feet away. Cora actually did pinch-run 36 times in his playing career, but this was not to be the 37th. He puts Danny Santana out there to score the series-winner when Enrique Hernandez sends a long fly ball to left that feels like it might clang the wall, but still results in a sacrifice fly. It's the fourth time the Red Sox have clinched a postseason series via walkoff; Jed Lowrie (single in 2008) and David Ortiz (homer in 2004) both sent the Angels home in the divisional round. The remaining walkoff was by Larry Gardner to win the 1912 World Series against the Giants; it was another "sac fly" as we would call it today, but back then there was no distinction made between sac flies and sac bunts, so it's not shown in contemporaneous boxscores.

California Love

We started with a winner-take-all game between perhaps the two biggest rivals in the game, we're going to end with a winner-take-all game between perhaps the two biggest rivals in the game. (Sorry, Cubs/Cardinals, maybe next year.) If any postseason series needed to go the distance, it's the first one in history between two teams who each won 106 games in the regular season. In fact, the Wild Card victory also gave the Dodgers 107 wins, so just like the Dodger Stadium parking lot in the 6th inning, the race is on to see who can reach 110 first.

Much like the other series, you've probably heard of the Dodgers' pitchers, especially when a couple of them were stars with other teams first. Schezer. Trevor Bauer. Kershaw (though he's done for the year). Walker Buehler. You might not have heard of the Giants' staff. It's okay if you still think they have MadBum and Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain. (They don't.) What they do have, at least in Game 1 (and later 5), is a 4th-rounder named Logan Webb who will turn 25 next month and who finished 11-3 in the regular season while averaging barely 1.1 baserunners per inning.

In Game 1 that ratio dropped to a mere 0.65 as Webb shut down the visiting Dodgers. The closest Los Angeles got to a "threat" was when Will Smith doubled with 1 out in the 7th, but Webb struck out the final two batters and, in keeping with the theme, never faced more than four in an inning. Oh by the way he also struck out 10. The only other Giants pitchers to strike out 10 and allow 0 runs in a postseason game are-- well, we just gave them to you. Madison Bumgarner (2014 Wild Card) and Tim Lincecum (2010 NLDS 1). No Giants pitcher had thrown 7+ scoreless innings and struck out 10 in a home game against the Dodgers since Ray Sadecki on June 25, 1968.

Buster Posey's 2-run homer off Buehler in the 1st would thus be all the offense the Giants really needed to win this one. Hunter Pence (2014), Pat Burrell (2010), Mel Ott (1933), and Irish Meusel (1922) are the only other Giants batters to hit a multi-run dinger in the 1st inning of a postseason game. The only other time that the Dodgers were shut out on 5 or fewer hits in a postseason Game 1 was in 1949 when Tommy Henrich of the Yankees hit a walkoff homer to beat them 1-0.

For Game 2 the Giants gave Kevin Gausman the ball, and you may remember Gausman from his days with the Orioles a few years ago. Much of that time didn't go well, but considering it's the Orioles, it wasn't always Gausman's fault. By the end of the 2nd, though, he's given up 3 hits and 2 walks and the Dodgers are ahead 2-0. One of those hits was by pitcher Julio Urias, the first RBI knock by a Dodgers hurler in the postseason since Zack Greinke in the 2013 NLCS against the Cardinals. Gausman then gave up a leadoff double to Trea Turner in the 6th before being removed, but that just meant Dominic Leone was forced to face Cody Bellinger and A.J. Pollock. And they both hit RBI doubles as well to blow up the Dodgers' lead to 6-1. When Matt Beaty singled home another run in the 8th, it marked the first game where the Dodgers got multiple RBIs from their #7, #8, and #9 spots in the same game since James Loney, Andy LaRoche, and pitcher Esteban Loaiza did it against the Cubs on September 3, 2007.

Game 3 is in Los Angeles and these teams just love playing 1-0 games at Chavez Ravine. You might remember one of our favorite quirks in recent history, which is that Joe Panik hit solo homers in both of the first two games of the 2018 season to single-handedly #BeatLA. If you're thinking "whatever happened to Joe Panik", he's been with four different teams since then via free agency, ending 2021 on the Marlins roster as a primary DH. [Narrator voice: The Marlins are in the National League. They don't need a DH in most games.]

But this is the game between Pitchers You've Probably Heard Of. Max Scherzer, acquired by the Dodgers in the biggest trade of the year back in July, faced off against Alex Wood, who pitched for the Dodgers as recently as last year's World Series. (Can confirm. We were AT one of his games.) But this time he needed 74 pitches to get through 4 innings, and he's not even the one who gave up the run. No, that would be Scherzer on a solo homer by Evan Longoria to lead off the 5th. So even though Max lasted all the way until the 7th, that lone homer tagged him with the loss and sent us on to Game 4. Only one other pitcher in Dodgers history has allowed 1 run, struck out 10+, and lost, and we've already mentioned it. It was Don Newcombe on that Tommy Heinrich homer in Game 1 of the 1949 World Series. The only other time the Dodgers lost a 1-0 postseason game at Chavez Ravine was Game 1 of the 1983 NLCS against Philadelphia.

On to Game 4, which features Walker Buehler, again, opposing Anthony DeSclafani, who you likely thought was still with the Reds. Nope, free agency got him too, and he signed with Giants last December and ended up making 31 starts for them this season. Most of them were better than this. He gave up 5 hits and 2 runs before being removed in the 2nd inning, joining Jake Peavy (2014), Rick Reuschel (1989), and Jack Bentley (1923) as the only Giants postseason starters to do that and take a loss. Most of the damage was done after DeSclafani departed, however. Mookie Betts cranked a 2-run homer in the 4th, the first multi-run tater ever hit in the postseason by a "Mookie". Wilson never hit any postseason homers, and Betts had three previous ones but they were all solo shots. Betts then drove in the Dodgers' fifth run with a sac fly in the 5th, joining Edwin Rios (2020 NLCS 4) and Steve Yeager (1977 WS 5) as the only players in team history with a homer and a sac fly in the same postseason game.

The Giants had the luxury of being up 2-1, and because it's 2021, they had no problem throwing the kitchen sink at this game. Really, the kitchen sink might have been more interesting. ("It was hot early on, but seems to have gone cold.") After DeSclafani's early exit, San Francisco trotted seven more pitchers out to the mound, with Zack Littell being the only one to get more than 3 outs. He's the first Giants reliever to get 6 outs with 4 strikeouts in a postseason game since that famous Madison Bumgarner 5-inning save in Game 7 of the 2014 World Series. Eventually the Giants would end up using 22 players in the game, matching the 2016 Nationals (NLDS 5 vs Dodgers) for the most in a 9-inning game in postseason history.

So we have finally arrived at what Vin Scully called the "most important" Dodgers/Giants game ever. Plenty of people tried to bring 1951 into the conversation, or even their follow-up 3-game tiebreaker in 1962. But hey, if Vin says it, it must be true, right?

The Dodgers previously announced their intent to start Julio Urias in Game 5. If by "start" you mean "have him show up in the 3rd inning", well, then, okay. In a neat little twist, Los Angeles sent reliever Corey Knebel out for the 1st inning as an "opener" and then Brusdar Graterol for the 2nd in his fourth appearance of the series. That seemed to work at first; they combined to give up 3 hits but no runs before Urias took over in the 3rd. And we were still knotted at 0-0 until the 6th when Corey Seager connected for a double off of Logan Webb. It was the first time-- regular season or post--- that a Dodgers batter had broken a 0-0 tie in the 6th or later at the Giants' current park. The only one to do it at Candlestick was Wes Parker on June 26, 1968.

Except that lead didn't last long. With Urias now pitching his fourth inning, Darin Ruf connects for a game-tying solo homer in the bottom half. The only other tying or go-ahead homer in Giants history to occur in the 6th or later of a WTA game was by Conor Gillaspie in the 2016 Wild Card game against the Mets.

By now Mookie Betts has collected 4 hits and a stolen base, joining George Brett (1985), Terry Puhl (1980), and Max Carey (1925) as the only players ever to do that in a winner-take-all game. He's the first Dodgers leadoff batter to do that in any game against the Giants since... the manager he's now playing for, Dave Roberts on September 19, 2003. And Logan Webb has gotten into the 8th allowing just that one run to Seager; he joined MadBum (2014 WC) and Ryan Vogelsong (2012 NLCS 6) as the only Giants pitchers to go 7+, allow 1 run, and strike out 7 in a potential elimination game.

But regardless, we're still stuck on 1-1 going to the 9th. Rookie Camilo Doval, who got a 2-inning save in Game 1, is back out on the mound to try and keep the Dodgers contained. He narrowly nicks Justin Turner with a pitch. That opens the door for Gavin Lux to shoot a single through the right side. And Cody Bellinger, whom you really haven't heard about this season, reminds us that he's still on the Dodgers with a single to center to score Turner and give the Dodgers a 2-1 lead with only three outs left to play. There have only been three go-ahead hits in the 9th or later of a winner-take-all game in Dodgers history, and they're all in this post. Remember Chris Taylor's walkoff in the Wild Card game? Seems so long ago. The other was Rick Monday's homer in the 1981 NLCS, which we already linked you in the WC section. May the circle be unbroken.

As for circles, the Giants faithful ended up with their heads spinning just a few minutes later. And first-base umpire Gabe Morales is going to have his definition of "going around" questioned for the rest of his career. (Not to mention, according to radio, being "pelted with beer cans" while leaving the field.) You hear all the time that teams and fans want the game decided "on the field", not by the league or even necessarily by the umpires. So when Morales rang up Wilmer Flores on a controversial check-swing call to end the game, it was anti-climactic to the "most important" game in this rivalry's history. Since we've all learned the rule book this week, there is no official definition of a "swing"; it's solely the umpire's judgement as to whether the batter is "attempting to strike at" the pitch.

Love that call or hate it, the pitcher who got that final out... was Max Scherzer. Remember him? Yeah, he's pitched in 431 career games prior to Thursday and never been anywhere near a save situation (unless you count finishing off his own 1-0 win or something). Turns out he's the third Dodgers pitcher to get a save in a winner-take-all game. Bob Welch, who was occasionally a reliever, got one in that same Rick Monday game in 1981 against the Expos. The Expos eventually became the Nationals. The other Dodgers pitcher with a save in a WTA game did it against the Nationals in 2016, also in a Game 5 of the Division Series. His name is Clayton Kershaw. That was Dave Roberts' first year as Dodgers manager. And in 416 career games, that's also Kershaw's only career save.

Starting pitcher for the Nats in that game? Max Scherzer. Because baseball.

Season's Greetings

When we started this escapade like 7 months ago, there was actually discussion about whether a full 162-game season was advisable on the heels of playing only 60 last year. There were rumors about extended spring training or a season of 100 or 120 games for "conditioning" purposes, and many of the minor leagues who didn't play at all in 2020 adopted some of those changes. But looks like we made it. Like 755, .406, or 5714, the number 2430 is just another random one outside of baseball circles. On the inside, however, you may recognize it as the total number of games in a full 162-game season. Looks like we made it.

1 down, 2429 to go (we hope).

— Doug Kern (@dakern74) April 1, 2021

And yes, there's an asterisk because the Braves and Rockies had a game rained out on September 16 and not made up because it didn't matter. So it was really 2429. But still, isn't it a lot more than you thought we'd get back in February or March?

Max Headroom

Even though every team* made it through those 162 games, a few of them started mailing it in toward the end. That allowed the teams who were already really good to appear even better. Which is why you're about to see a lot of Yankees and Dodgers and Giants in this mix. (But not exclusively, hang in there.) Consider it a warmup for the rest of October.

The Dodgers, already having passed 100 wins on the season, would host the typically-mediocre Padres for the final time this week, with San Diego trying just to break .500 in a full season for the first time since 2010. (They failed at this. Again.) On Wednesday came the first of those games that we just knew we'd be writing about. It begins with Max Scherzer on the mound, so it always has potential. It also begins with Ryan Weathers on the hill for San Diego, which means the Dodgers' ledger begins with a double, two singles, and a homer around two fly-ball outs. It was the Dodgers' first 4-run 1st inning in a home game against the Padres since July 8, 2016, against Andrew Cashner. Corey Seager would add another run in the 2nd and chase Weathers from the game after 3 innings and (yikes!) 62 pitches. And he's not going to get a loss because by now you know that if this game had gone smoothly, it wouldn't be here.

As we said, any Max Scherzer game has potential, but it's usually not this kind. He pitched around a pair of singles in the 1st, gave up a 2-run homer to Manny Machado in the 3rd before escaping the inning with a double play, then gave up three more hits in the 4th such that the Padres came back to tie the game 5-5. Scherzer exits in the 6th after giving up a go-ahead triple to Wil Myers, the Padres' first such hit at Dodger Stadium since Eddie Williams off Ismael Valdez on August 3, 1994. That's actually the 11th hit off Scherzer in the game, and he's on the hook for a loss (and the Padres maybe getting back to .500). Brusdar Graterol does not help the cause by facing four batters in the 7th and getting none of them out. It's 9-5 San Diego when he leaves. And then things got interesting.

Emilio Pagán gets the 8th with a 9-6 lead after Mookie Betts homers. Here's how that went: Max Muncy homer to right-center. A.J. Pollock homer to right. Chris Taylor fly ball to the warning track in center. Cody Bellinger homer to right. Justin Turner double down the left-field line. It's 9-9 and you can un-hook Max Scherzer; he's the first Dodgres pitcher to give up 11 hits and 6 runs in a home game and not take a loss since Jeff Weaver did it against the Reds on July 27, 2005. And Pagán just became the fourth pitcher in Padres history to surrender 3 homers while getting only 1 out, after Chad Qualls (2011), Dario Veras (1997), and Doug Bochtler (1996).

So how does this one get settled, you ask? Well, not through those pesky free runners, which we maintain really aren't needed in a slugfest where teams are already scoring at will. Corey Seager comes up later in the 8th and says, we don't need no stinkin' free runners, here's a 2-run bomb for an 11-9 win. That is the twelfth time since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 that they've hit 6 homers in a game, with eight of those twelve coming just in the past four seasons. But in that 5-run 8th, there were 4 homers alone (three off Pagán plus Seager). The last time the Dodgers slugged four taters in an inning was September 5, 2016, against Arizona. But even Wednesday won't go down as their most-famous time hitting 4 homers in an inning. For that you need Vin Scully.

The Heat Is On

Conventional wisdom (and some kind of hydrological science) says that baseballs go farther in warm air because of the air's lower density. So we haven't seen too many home-run eruptions as summer turns to fall. However, you might have heard it stays pretty warm in Los Angeles while the rest of us are still pondering just how cold it can get before we finally "have to" turn the heat on for the night.

So now to Thursday's series finale at Dodger Stadium. After Corey Seager put a bow on Wednesday's proceedings, he's up second against Vince Velasquez to start the next game. And naturally he goes yard again to give the Dodgers another 2-run lead that will eventually hold up for a win. Did we mention Seager didn't hit a 2-run homer? No, because Mookie Betts also took Velasquez deep, the first time the Dodgers have ever started a game against the Padres with back-to-back homers.

Velasquez settles down for a couple innings but then Justin Turner and A.J. Pollock come up with 2 outs in the 4th. And both of them also connect for homers. That's two sets of back-to-back jacks in the same game, and for as unusual as that feels, the Dodgers already did it back in July in that 22-1 jamboree against the Diamondbacks. Although we can recognize Vince Velasquez for being the first Padres pitcher to give up multiple sets of back-to-back homers in a game-- unless you count Craig Stammen surrendering them to four straight batters on June 9, 2019. (Is that three sets of B2B's?)

Fernando Tatis Jr hits his 42nd home run in the 5th to surpass Phil Nevin (2001) for second place on the Padres' single-season list. He still didn't end up topping Greg Vaughn's 50 in 1998, but who will? But this one is ultimately all Dodgers, capped off in the same way it started, with Corey Seager's solo shot in the 7th. Seager joins Yasiel Puig (2013) and Mike Marshall (1994) as the only Dodgers batters with 2 homers and a double in a home game against the Padres. And it's the fifth round-tripper of the game for Los Angeles-- after they hit six yesterday. They've only hit 5 homers in back-to-back games two other times in their history: April 6-7, 2001, against San Francisco; and June 29-30, 1996, at (of course) Coors Field.

Class of 93

Speaking of teams hitting 5 homers, it's always a nice toasty 20° inside Rogers Centre, so you would expect the temperature-based component of the home run numbers to be fairly consistent. That is, until they open the roof. It was a balmly 14° on the final day of September in Toronto, so let it fly. And traditionally when we mention a 5-homer game in Toronto, it means the Jays went and unloaded on somebody. Not this week.

Now, we will give Toronto a shout-out for two homer-related things. On Saturday they broke their single-season record when Danny Jansen hit the team's 258th. That ranked them eighth among teams all-time, and the top four were all recorded two seasons ago when all the pitchers were complaining about MLB changing the balls (remember when that was our biggest problem?). On Sunday they jumped the 2005 Rangers to finish in seventh place with 262.

Also, a combined 93 of those dingers were hit by Vlad Guerrero Jr (48) and Marcus Semien (45), who became the fifth set of teammates in MLB history with 45 each. You can probably name some of the other pairs to do it. We'll spot you Mantle & Maris (1961), plus Ruth & Gehrig (twice). Then throw in A-Rod & Rafael Palmeiro for the 2001 Mariners, and the most recent pair, David Ortiz & Manny Ramirez in 2005.

But back to Thursday. If we said Robbie Ray would be starting for the Jays and there would be a bunch of homers, your first reaction is not, oh, Robbie Ray's going to give up a bunch of homers. Aaron Judge's reaction to the first pitch he sees is to homer. 1-0 Yankees. They get that run back off Corey Kluber in the 2nd, then go ahead when Vladdy and Semien combine for a run in the 5th. And then the Yankees do what they've done all season, wake up in the late innings. Anthony Rizzo homers off Ray in the 6th to tie it back up. Aaron Judge needs three pitches this time before homering again. Giancarlo Stanton works a 7-pitch walk and then Gleyber Torres unloads. In 14 pitches we've gone from 2-1 to 5-2 and knocked Ray out of the game after his fourth homer. He's the first Jays pitcher to surrender four in a home game (any home) since Jason Grilli did it in relief on May 3, 2017.

Brett Gardner adds another solo homer in the 9th, thus creating just the third road game in Yankees history where they hit 5 homers but didn't get to 7 runs. It happened at Fenway Park on the 100th anniversary of its opening, April 20, 2012; and also at Comerica on July 15, 2004. As for Aaron Judge, he also enjoys going yard against Toronto. He did it on September 24, 2017, and again on April 14 of this year, although the Yanks lost both those games. But Thursday makes him the first batter in team history to have three multi-homer games against the Jays. (Did it twice: Robinson Cano, Jason Giambi, Cliff Johnson, Alfonso Soriano, Dave Winfield.)

And if you were keeping score along with us, we noted that Judge put the Yankees up 1-0 in the 1st. As the latter half of the back-to-back in the 6th, he also put the Yankees ahead 3-2. While it's true there's not a lot of late-game heroics there, it's the fifth time in his career that Judge has hit multiple go-ahead homers in the same game. And that's an all-time Yankees record. Their only player to have done it four times... was Mickey Mantle.

Destiny's Child

So the Yankees head into their final series of the year controlling their own destiny when it comes to Wild Card spots. And somewhere there's a meme of a bus going over a cliff. Needing one win to secure home field, they trot out Nestor Cortes, Jordan Montgomery, and Jameson Taillon against their nemesis the Rays. Sounds like a plan.

Cortes gives up two early runs which probably should have been more, except that Francisco Mejia thinks he can go first-to-third on a single to left. And sure, he can go to third, but the ball is going to beat him there by about 20 feet. Then, mysteriously, the Yankees offense gets shut down by the rookie stylings of Shane McClanahan, Louis Head, and Josh Fleming. (Yeah, we had to look them up too.) The Yankees finally advance the tying run to second base in the 9th but Gary Sanchez and Rougned Odor both strike out to end the game. Flash back to Opening Day when Giancarlo Stanton and Gleyber Torres did it. That's twice this year, matching the number of such endings the Yankees had in the previous 10 seasons combined. Friday was also the first time the Yankees had ever collected 10 strikeouts and 0 walks on offense against Tampa Bay, leaving the Angels as the only AL opponent against whom they've never done it.

And look at the bright side, at least there was no frustratingly dramatic ending for the Yankees on Saturday. The 5-homer thread has been woven all through this section, but this time it's getting the twist that Brandon Lowe had three of them. The first two batters of the game reach against Montgomery, and then Lowe deposits one to the famous "short porch" at Yankee Stadium for a 3-0 lead. Let's repeat this exercise to start the 3rd. Mike Zunino follows with a back-to-back to make it 7-1 and put the Rays well on their way to their first-ever 100-win season. Montgomery is the first Yankees starter to give up 7 runs and 3 homers since J.A. Happ did it in June 2019. Happ is, of course, no longer with the Yankees, and didn't do it when the team had a magic number of 1.

Yandy Diaz deprives Lowe of the chance at another 3-run homer by striking out to end the 6th. That means the only thing Lowe can do to start the 7th is hit a solo shot to join Carlos Peña (2007) and Ben Zobrist (2011) as the only Rays to have 7 RBI in a game. He's also the sixth in team history with a 3-homer game, and the only one on both lists. Bizarrely, the first four 3-homer games all came at the Trop, and the last two have been at Yankee Stadium. That other list is Johnny Gomes (2005), Evan Longoria (2008 and 2012), B.J. Upton (2012), and Travis d'Arnaud (2019). And as for the combo of 3 HR and 7 RBI happening at Yankee Stadium, well... now it has. Nobody, not even any of the Yankees, had done that at their current building before Brandon Lowe pulled it off on Saturday. The last to do it at the old place across 161 St was Alex Rodriguez on April 26, 2005, in his "historic" 10-RBI game against the Angels.

All Seven And We'll Watch Them Fall

We promised you this would not be all about a bunch of playoff teams. You're going to hear from them for the next few weeks. In the AL it takes 92 wins just to get a Wild Card spot. Over in the "senior circuit" you can win a division with 88 because everyone's racing to the bottom.

We don't know what will become of The New Rules as they relate to 7-inning doubleheaders. Up for grabs in the collective bargaining that will happen in December. But if we've seen the end of them, then it's appropriate that the last one ended on an extra-inning walkoff. You know, in the 9th.

That possibly-last-ever 7-inning twinbill was on Tuesday between the Mets and Marlins in that division where you only need 88 wins. These two combatants began the day with 137. Combined. The Mets made fairly easy work of Game 1, helped by Brandon Nimmo's leadoff triple. The last Mets batter to start a doubleheader with a triple was Mookie Wilson on July 2, 1983, against the Phillies. (If, like us, you see that date and "Phillies doubleheader" and think "4:40 am", that was exactly 10 years later.) It also turns out Nimmo hit a leadoff triple on the previous Friday against the Brewers, and is thus the second batter in Mets history to have two in five days. Jose Reyes did it in back-to-back games at (of course) Coors Field in June 2008.

As for Game 2, it's another 1-1 snoozefest where those free runners come in handy. The Marlins botched a chance in the 4th when Eddy Alvarez was ruled to have made a move toward second and got tagged out on what should have been a bases-loading single. The Mets lose their best scoring chance in the 5th by lining into a double play. And even the first three free runners can't score, so we're into the bottom of the 9th. Or is that the 16th? (We did play a 16 earlier this year, remember?)

Finally Pete Alonso's groundout moves free runner Javier Baez over to third. James McCann hits a little chopper out in front of the plate, Baez senses that he's got a chance, and heck, if he's wrong we just keep playing. Pitcher Bass knows the only play is at home, but his attempt to barehand-scoop the ball fails and Baez slides in with the winning run. We've covered this before, and are quite surprised that it didn't get scored as an infield single, given that they likely didn't have a play on McCann at first either. But here we are with the Mets' third walkoff "FCX" (fielder's choice, no out) of the season. One of the others, by Patrick Mazeika on May 7, was also in extra innings. And the three from 2021 matches the total number of walkoff FCX's that the Mets had in the prior 20 seasons.

Pete Alonso capped a doubleheader with a walkoff homer back on August 12 against Washington; the last season where the Mets walked off in multiple nightcaps was also 1983. Their last extra-inning walkoff against the Marlins was a bases-loaded walk to Nimmo on September 24, 2019. And Anthony Bass of the fumbled flip attempt, well, he gets his own little piece of Marlins history. Because of the scoring, he's the team's first pitcher ever to allow 0 hits, 0 walks, and 0 earned runs (remember, free runner) and take a loss.

And as the Marlins tried to race Washington to the bottom spot in the NL East (they even failed at this), they were helped by a 12-3 thumping in Thursday's finale. Pete Alonso went deep twice for his 11th career multi-homer game; he's one of nine Mets players ever to have that many and halfway to Darryl Strawberry's team record of 22. (David Wright, Dave Kingman, Carlos Beltran, Mike Piazza, you can guess most of them.) But the big blow came from Francisco Lindor's grand slam as part of a 6-run 8th. It was the Mets' first slam that late in a home game since Jose Bautista hit a walkoff against Toronto on July 6, 2018. But Lindor also hit a slam against the Pirates on July 9 of this year (in the 6th). The only other players to hit two slams at Citi Field in the same season are Amed Rosario in 2019 and Fernando Tatis Sr in 2009.

New Moon On Monday

There were only supposed to be two games on Monday. Other than that Thursday after the All-Star Game, when MLB decided to over-hype another Yankees/Red Sox game by making it the only game of the day (and then it got rained out!), it was the most baseball-less day of the season. And then Monday saw 66 runs scored.

No, the Jays didn't bust out for 44 in three games again. It seems that the previous Wednesday happened. On September 22 a large patch of rain parked itself over Ohio and cancelled the home games in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Detroit. Because of the nearly-league-wide off day on Monday, here's our chance to make all those games up and complete our slate of 2430-- er, 2429. So two games actually became five. Even so, 66 runs is still a lot, especially if we tell you the Pirates only had 1.

So who did have a lot? That would be the Pirates' opponent, the Reds, who knew they would technically still be alive in the playoff race for another day because the Cardinals were off. May as well go down swinging. And swing they did. The first time through the order against Connor Overton, every single Reds batter ended their plate appearance with a swing. And all nine of those PAs were in the 1st inning. Oof, yeah. Single, double, sac fly by Nick Castellanos, Joey Votto 2-run homer. The remaining five batters combine for three more singles, another run, and two (swinging) strikeouts to ensure that they won't face Connor Overton again in the 2nd. Instead they'll get 4 unearned runs off Cody Ponce after an error, another sac fly from Nick Castellanos, and another 2-run homer from Joey Votto. Stop us if you've heard this one. Votto has, by the 4th inning, recorded his 10th career game with 2 homers and 4 RBI, two shy of the team record shared by George Foster, Frank Robinson, and (he seems to come up every week) Johnny Bench.

Meanwhile, the Pirates are dealing with the MLB debut of Reiver Sanmartin, who was part of the Sonny Gray trade with the Yankees in early 2019 and has been hanging out down in Louisville ever since. We talk about this happening in debuts all the time as if film and scouts don't exist, but Anthony Alford is the only Pirates batter who can solve him, getting a single and a double and scoring that lone Pirates run on a wild pitch. Sanmartin gets pulled in the 6th after a couple of hard-hit balls, but ends up being the third Reds pitcher this century to throw 5+ innings in his MLB debut, allow 1 run, and get a win. The others were Amir Garrett in 2017 and Johnny Cueto in 2008.

It's already 8-1 when Nick Castellanos appears again, and this time he's not going to be bothered with another sac fly so that Joey Votto can hog all the glory again. Nope, this time he connects for his own 3-run homer and it's 11-1. (And besides, sac flies are really just multi-run homers that didn't make it.) Turns out Castellanos had homered in all three Reds victories against the Nationals over the weekend (remember, they're racing Miami to the bottom); he's the first Reds batter with a 4-game homer streak at GABP since Aristides Aquino in August 2019. But he's also the first Cincinnati batter since sac flies were split off in 1954 to have two of them plus a homer in the same game.

The 13-1 final ended up being the third time this season that the Reds had defeated the Pirates by a dozen or more. In the previous 100 seasons it happened four times total. It's also the sixth time the Pirates lost a 12-run decision this season, their most since the 1890 "campaign" when many of their best hitters defected to the Players League and they finished an impressive 23-113 (66½ games out).

Sleepless In Seattle

Now, if MLB is only going to schedule two games on a day, can they at least be early? You've gotta dump Seattle on us? Who can't even move their games to 6:30 like many other west-coast teams? (Don't get us wrong, the city is tremendous, but there's some East Coasters who have to go to work tomorrow. Hurry up.) But nope, here we are waiting for a "10:10" start to an AL West game that you just know is going to end with a score of 3-1 and somehow take 3½ hours. Well, it did take 3½ hours. But we certainly didn't count on both teams scoring a 3 and a 1.

For Oakland it was literally a 3 and a 1. The 3 was Seth Brown's homer in the 1st inning, a first for the A's at Safeco/T-Mobile since Matt Olson on July 7, 2019. The 1 would be an RBI single by Khris Davis in the 4th. And that's where their sidewalk ends. Four Seattle relievers come on to throw 1 perfect inning each, the fourth time in team history that's happened in a game. Except two of those others were in extra-inning games, one was in a blowout loss, and none of the others were by four consecutive pitchers. So there's that.

As for the Mariners, they're going to score a 1 and a 3-- next to each other. Like the Reds before them, they piled up 13 runs with a bunch of 3's along the way. There are 3 runs off Cole Irvin in the 3rd. There is a 3-run homer by Mitch Haniger in the 4th. There is-- wait-- another? 3-run homer by Mitch Haniger in the 6th? Yep, more in a moment. And Ty France adds a "wacky" 2-run single in the 7th by clocking a comebacker off Sam Moll's hip and all the way into left field. As mentioned in that clip, France had 4 RBI on the day, plus 4 hits and 3 runs scored. No Mariners batter had done that since Adam Lind, also against the A's, on May 25, 2016. The 13-4 final was the second time the M's had ever dropped a baker's dozen on Oakland; they shut them out at the Coliseum on July 2, 2003.

And back to Haniger, he's the first Mariners batter with multiple 3-run homers in a home game since Daniel Vogelbach against the Angels on July 19, 2019. And he's only the fourth in team history with a 6-RBI game against Oakland. The aforementioned Adam Lind is one of the others, along with Darnell Coles (August 5, 1989) and Gorman Thomas (Apr 11, 1985). All of those games happened to be in Seattle, though that wasn't part of our criteria.

It leaves you to face the fall alone. When you need it most, it stops. You see snippets of this quote from Bart Giamatti every year. But it sure was fun while it lasted. Especially considering the challenges of the last two years. So let's celebrate our seasons in the sun with this cheesy '70s classic. Intermission!

Season On The Brink

For the final regular-season post we decided to recap our favorite quirky stat lines. These are the items that just fill us with joy when we see them in a boxscore, and we tend to touch on them during the season when they happen. But you never get a neat summary at the end of the year. So here we go.

⚾ Rinse Cycle ⚾

The year 2000 did not see an MLB no-hitter. Guess it already had enough zeroes in it. That was the year that the count of cycles in MLB history finally overtook the count of no-hitters. It's still fairly close, 333 to 314. Our fondest (and perhaps only) memory of Brewers catcher George Kottaras is that he finally recorded the first cycle of 2011-- in September. But every year back to 1984 has had one, until that streak was snapped by the shortened season last year.

Trea Turner returned us to the normal cycle of things in spectacular fashion. The hits themselves weren't any more spectacular, but it's notable for quite a few reasons, not the least of which is that Turner got traded a month later. It was June 30 when the Nationals recorded a 15-6 win over the Rays. June 30 is Trea Turner's birthday. Nobody's ever hit for the cycle on their birthday before. And even though he's now 28, we'll give Turner a tri-cycle for his birthday. Because he also did it in 2017 and 2019 (not on his birthday); only four other players in MLB history have a total of three cycles. They are Bob Meusel (1921-28), Adrian Beltre (2008-15), Babe Herman (1931-33), and John Reilly (1883-90).

Jake Cronenworth fired off the second cycle of the season against Washington on July 16, the first time the Nats/Expos franchise has ever hit one and allowed one in the same season. Freddie Freeman did it in his first four at-bats on August 18, and then Eddie Rosario had a 4-for-4 game with a cycle on September 19. That's the first time in Braves history (all the way back to 1876 in Boston) that they've had two cycles in the same season.

⚾ Short Cycle ⚾

Just as there are still some people who insist on doing the wave, there are still those who get excited because such-and-such is "a triple shy of the cycle". Yeah, they all are. There were 253 of those this season, down from recent highs, but still it's been over 200 in every full season since 1993, which oh yeah, was the first season with 28 teams. Stop it. Just for kicks, though, we will mention that the 2021 lead in that category was shared by Byron Buxton, Vlad Junior, Bryce Harper, Anthony Santander, and Jesse Winker with 4 each.

No, it's much more fun to miss the cycle by something else. The homer is easy to not hit. You can go out to beer-league softball and manage to not homer. Twenty-two big leaguers pulled that off this year, going single-double-triple but not getting the four-bagger. Amed Rosario was the only one to do it twice.

The double had a mere 16 misses, and nobody did that twice. But amazingly, there are four players who appear on the previous two lists. I.e., they had a game where they missed the homer and a game where they missed the double. They are Bryan Reynolds (who just had one of his on Saturday), Jesús Sanchez, Jonathan Villar, and Nolan Arenado.

And then there are the rarest group. Those six individuals who managed to homer, triple, and double, but could never be bothered to stop at first base. Those lucky winners are Daulton Varsho, Jose Abreu, Marcus Semien, Max Schrock, Shohei Ohtani, and Taylor Jones. Semien actually did the same thing with Oakland back in 2019; the previous player to do it for multiple teams was Yoenis Cespedes. And by also having three games where he was "a triple shy", Semien joins that logjam above for the 2021 shared title of most "near-cycles".

⚾ Immaculata ⚾

No, not the university outside Philadelphia. Like the "addenda" or the "errata" in a reference book, our "immaculata" is the plural form of an immaculate inning. These actually don't show up in a boxscore, so they're easy to miss. Happily Twitter likes to alert us when one happens.

An immaculate inning, as it's known, is when a pitcher strikes out three batters on nine pitched balls. Thanks to the pitch clocks and the automatic ball and strike rules, it's now theoretically possible to strike out batters on less than three pitches, but fortunately that hasn't happened yet. (Can something be "more immaculate"?) So we'll have to do with the list of five pitchers who pulled this stunt in 2021.

Kyle Finnegan of the Nationals had the first one of the year, fanning Austin Riley, Dansby Swanson, and William Contreras on May 5. That was the 100th known immaculate inning in MLB history, making it one-third as common as a no-hitter. However, since you can't discern it just by looking at a boxscore in a newspaper, it's very possible that some have been lost to history. Another Nationals pitcher, Max Scherzer, would-- oh hang on. He got traded just like Trea Turner. So when Scherzer threw his on September 12, it was the first for the Dodgers since Zac Rosscup on August 19, 2018. All is not lost, however, Nats fans: Scherzer did throw two of these while with the Nationals. The only other pitchers to do it for multiple teams over the course of a career are Kevin Gausman, Randy Johnson, and Nolan Ryan.

As you can see, that gives Scherzer three such innings in his career. That puts him on a very short list that previously contained only Sandy Koufax. Until Chris Sale jumped the line 17 days before Scherzer. On August 26, he also threw one for the Red Sox, the third of his career after doing it twice in a month in 2019. Since Scherzer's were with different teams, Sale and Koufax are the only ones to have three with the same team.

The remaining two came seemingly out of nowhere, if by "nowhere" you mean the Yankees bullpen carousel. Michael King, when they tried to (had to?) use him as a starter for a few games in June, tossed one against the Red Sox, the first time Boston's ever been on both sides of one in the same season. And then, because weird things must happen in baseball on July 4, Chad Green comes along and throws another one against the Mets. The Yankees had never before thrown two in a season. The Mets have been on the wrong end of four of them, two against the Yankees (Ivan Nova in 2013) and one against the aforementioned Sandy Koufax.

⚾ I'm Just Gonna Keep On Counting ⚾

There's another way to quickly get three outs in an inning, and the 2021 Yankees seemed to have mastered that one also. On May 21 they turned the traditional 5-4-3 triple play when Andrew Vaughn of the White Sox drilled one right at Gio Urshela near the third-base bag. On June 20 Sean Murphy of the A's did the exact same thing. And in the meantime, Vlad Guerrero Jr hit into this interesting little number which, if you are doing numbers at home, goes ((1-3)-6-2-5)-6. According to SABR, it's the first triple play of its kind in MLB history, and we should mention that it's started by the same Michael King who threw one of those immaculate innings earlier in the month. (He's the first known pitcher to throw an "II" and also start a triple play in the same season.)

As for the Yankees, they matched the major-league record with 3 TPs in a season. The 2016 White Sox are the only other team in the past 40 years to appear on the list, but it gets longer as you go further back. And while we also didn't have any TPs after the All-Star break, the Reds and Twins both turned them in the first half of the season as well. It's the first season to see five of them before the end of June since 1979, which is the year that holds the modern-day record of 11 TPs total.

⚾ Grand Scheme Of Things ⚾

The year 2000 may not have had any no-hitters, but it did have a record number of "4-run homers" as we occasionally refer to them. There were 176 grand slams hit that season. The second-most? That's going to be held by 2021 when there were 159. Granted, 2018 will forever be the year of the walkoff slam with nine of them, but this season had six of them, the most dramatic being Daniel Vogelbach's game-winner for the Brewers on September 5 when they were down by 3 runs.

As grand slams go, however, you can't beat the story of Daniel Camarena. The Padres had plenty of strange pitching events this year, but Camarena famously launched a grand slam for his first major-league hit back on July 8. Did we mention he's a reliever? They never bat for themselves. The only other Padres pitcher ever to hit a slam had been Mike Corkins in 1970. And it turns out both grand slams hit by pitchers this year came against the Nationals. Huascar Ynoa of the Braves had the other one back on May 4. The last team to give up two pitcher slams in a season was the 2008 Mets, against whom Felix Hernandez and Jason Marquis both hit one.

As for total slams, Trea Turner brought the Dodgers into a tie for that title by hitting one in Sunday's season finale. The Dodgers and Rockies each had 11, and of course, one of those teams plays most of its game at sea level. The Braves ended up with 10. Among those record-setting 262 homers for Toronto were four slams by Lourdes Gurriel to take the individual title. Jose Altuve, C.J. Cron, and Brett Phillips each had three. In so doing, Gurriel also became the first batter in Jays history to hit four slams in one season.

And the most-useless slam of the season? It's close, but we're giving this one to Phillips. He got on that list above by cranking one on August 11 at Fenway Park in the 9th inning... when the Rays were trailing by 17 runs. Ooooh, so they lose 20-8 instead of 20-3. Goal differential isn't a tiebreaker here. The Rays hadn't ever hit a slam when trailing by more than seven prior to that.

⚾ Saved By Zero ⚾

Even in a perfect game, everybody gets to bat three times. Or at least every spot gets to bat three times. Four and five plate appearances are very common. So it takes some effort to play an entire game and not have an at-bat. Every one of those four or five PAs has to fall into one of the handful of things that don't count as an AB against the batter. If you've ever balanced a boxscore, you know this list: Walk, hit-by-pitch, sac fly, sac bunt, interference or obstruction. So when we see 0-for-0 in a boxscore, we get entirely too excited.

Of course, there are plenty of occasions where someone will get hit by a pitch in their first PA and have to leave the game because of it. Those don't count. We're talking start the game, finish the game, don't get an AB. Sometimes someone will be taken out in the 9th for defensive reasons and shatter our dreams. But this season someone shattered our record book.

With more of those defensive replacements happening, and going back to double-switches because pitchers are batting again, 2021 turned out to be a slow year for this. Only four players pulled off a complete-game 0-for-0 this season; in the 60-game season last year there were even three. Before that the 20-year average was exactly 6.5. So would you believe that three of those four players... were Yasmani Grandal! And they all happened in the same month!

Back in May, before it was obvious that the White Sox would run away with the AL Central, the rest of the division wanted nothing to do with Grandal. It's not that he was a gigantic threat; he started the month batting .127. But so he was plopped down there in the 6th or 7th spot, usually with a couple of "easy outs" behind him, so let's not have today be the day he gets hot. Or maybe they had him watch some cheesy video about "plate discipline" on a bus ride. Who knows. But it worked.

May 1 against Cleveland, Grandal sees 20 pitches. He swings at two of them, fouling both. He ends the game with 4 walks in 4 PA. Ever seen a 4-walk game by a guy hitting a buck-27? Not that deep into a season you haven't. At least not in the 20 years of data we could access quickly. We found one in May 2009 where A-Rod was at .136.

A week later at Kauffman Stadium, Grandal sends a drive to deep center that has a shot at being a 3-run homer. It doesn't get there. You know what we call that: A sacrifice fly. That was part of an 8-run 1st inning for the White Sox, so after that, the Royals don't need any more Chicago batters hitting anything. For the remainder of the game Grandal sees 18 pitches and doesn't swing at any of them. One ends up as what we like to call the "3-0 mercy strike". And he ends up with another 4-walk game and another 0-for-0.

May 17, we're in Minnesota. This one is a 16-4 Sox blowout. Once again Grandal pops a sac fly to cap a 3-run 1st inning. After that, 22 pitches and one swing (and it's on 3-0!). Four more walks. [Chanting] Four more walks. In two weeks, partly because he's got no at-bats to add, Grandal has "raised" his average to .132. And yet mysteriously he has become the third player in the modern era to have three complete-game 0-for-0's in the same season.

We're going to be nice and spot you Wally Schang of the 1915 Athletics. Schang got hit by a pitch in two of his games, and actually scored at least 1 run in all of them. You can ruminate on the other (it's kinda obvious) while we tell you that the fourth and final player with a complete-game 0-for-0 this year was Michael Conforto of the Mets-- and that was in one of those pesky 7-inning doubleheaders on July 10 against Pittsburgh. So while it was the Mets' first one in over 6 years (Eric Campbell, June 28, 2015), much like MadBum's no-hitter, does it really count?

You got the answer, right? Think intentional walks. Think the guy who was intentionally walked with the bases loaded so he'd only drive home 1 run instead of 4. Yeah, it's Barry Bonds in the year he absolutely annihilated his own IBB record, 2004.

⚾ Tri As We Might ⚾

We have something here that we affectionately call the "Kernels trifecta". Pitchers can do a lot of weird stuff. They can lose their grip and hurl one to the backstop. They can fall off the mound. They can hiccup and get called for a balk. They can stick pine tar to their neck and get ejected. They can charge Don Zimmer. At least they can't do that fake third-to-first pickoff move anymore because that was stupid and never worked anyway. But it's when they do some combination of all these things that our Spidey Sense lights up.

A "Kernels trifecta", for the uninitiated, is when a pitcher hits a batter, throws a wild pitch, and commits a balk, all in the same game. These are generally the three "extra" pitching stats that are listed in running text at the bottom of your boxscore, so when they all show up together, we take notice. It doesn't happen often. But we had five of them this season, the most in a decade, and sadly all of them were before the All-Star break.

Zack Godley and Adrian Houser of the Brewers were our first two lucky winners, doing it on April 28 and May 14 respectively. For extra fun, both of them walked 5 batters, so clearly there were some "control problems". It's the first time a team has had two pitchers nail the trifecta since MadBum and Jeremy Affeldt for the 2014 Giants. Out of curiosity, we added the 5 walks to create a superfecta, and no other team in the modern era has pulled that off twice.

Vladimir Guttierez of the Reds was our third trifecta of the year, doing so on June 9 against Milwaukee. The Brewers are first team to be on both sides of one of these since the 2008 Tigers. And two days later, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani hit the trifecta and, as he usually does, took it up another notch by committing two balks. That was the first one to include a second balk since Stephen Strasburg on September 8, 2013. Our list concludes with Travis Lakins of the Orioles on June 29, Baltimore's first one since Daniel Cabrera on April 28, 2008.

⚾ C'ing I Dog ⚾

We can't help ourselves, we love that quirky call known as catcher's interference. The possessive, and the fact that it's charged as an E2, connotes that it should be called when the catcher gets antsy (say, trying to prevent a stolen base) and gets in the way of the batter's swing. However, in these "modern" times of hitters buying a split-second by standing way back in the box, and of humongous home-run hitters taking huge cuts with huge backswings, it's actually become a strategic element for the offense. There are players like Jacoby Ellsbury and Paul Goldschmidt who can seemingly get this call at will by just clipping the catcher's glove in the normal course of a backswing, even if the catcher is still in his little box and not even trying to make a play. (Sidebar: Add some kind of "intent" rule and make it reviewable.)

Until that happens, however, we'll just continue making history. The 2021 season finished with 62 CI calls, one more than the existing record from two seasons ago. And Murphy's Law, the record-setting one happened last Tuesday in some Murphy-on-Murphy violence. Tom Murphy of the Mariners had the bat and Sean Murphy of the A's had the glove. (We always point out here that CI's were not regularly reported in league statistics until the 1960s because they were so rare. So there are some lost to history, but even 15 years ago there were less than 30 a year. The times, they are a-changing.)

He's not going to quite match Jacoby Ellsbury's record, but Jorge Soler of the Cubs is this year's master of the backswing. He's been awarded first base on a CI eight times, the most since Ellsbury's record-setting season in 2016 (12x). And on the other side of the ledger, we have a three-way tie for the catchers who got called for the infraction most often. James McCann of the Mets, Austin Barnes of the Dodgers, and our old friend Yasmani Grandal for Chicago, share the award for "committing" 4 CI's this season.

⚾ Hit 'Em Up Style ⚾

We can't leave 2021 without mentioning all those darnedable no-hitters. Well, we could, but it wouldn't really be fair.

You probably already know that there were a record nine no-hitters in 2021, breaking a mark that had stood since 1884 when there were three leagues and the mound was 55 feet away. Don't forget the two "unofficial" no-hitters, one by Madison Bumgarner and the other by the Rays, that mysteriously don't count because MLB decided to make the games 7 innings long. (Maybe if they've got one through 7, they just let them keep playing to see if they can finish 9. Shades of spring training.) The only season in the modern era that even comes close to having 11 no-hitters is 1990, which had 9 of them and also included some "unofficial" ones like Andy Hawkins' 4-unearned-run loss. That was part of the reason for Fay Vincent's "committee" in the following year that revoked a lot of previous no-hitters with asterisks.

The Indians became the first team in MLB history to get no-hit either three times officially or four times unofficially (they were on the other end of that Rays 7-inning one). Joe Musgrove threw the first one in Padres history after a 52-year drought. But beyond the sheer number of NH's, there was the number of scares we had. Did you eventually have to turn off the MLB notifications when one got through the 5th? According to Friend Of Kernels Dirk Lammers (aka @NoNoHitters), whose website is actually now first on that initial Google screen of "frequently used", there were 50 games this season that got into the 7th inning with a no-hitter intact. One of them-- Corbin Burnes and Jose Berrios back in April-- was a double! That's way more than any other season we know about. And if you break down those 51 starts, you'll find that 27 of the 30 teams had one. The three who didn't were literally the last three-- Texas, Toronto, and Washington.

We do not say this enough during the season, but we owe lots of gratitude to several sources for the ability to mine this material. The vast majority of our notes come from Baseball Reference and its subsite Stathead, which is worth the subscription if you've ever wanted to look up stuff like this yourself. Retrosheet is an invaluable resource, especially for info on 19th-century teams and players. Baseball Almanac has lots of good lists of historical info such as cycles and immaculate innings. The Society for American Baseball Research (you know it as SABR) gives us a lot of historical context around games and players and also maintains a few databases on things like triple plays. SportsDatabase and its SDQL query provide a lot of our info on scoring by innings, and it's sad to think it might be going away this winter. Other notes, or ideas for them, come from the Elias Sports Bureau, Stats By Stats, Rogers Sportsnet, and [in PBS voiceover] from viewers like you. Thank you.

Bottom Of The Bag

⚾ Austin Slater, Saturday: 18th pinch-hit homer of the season for the Giants, setting a new MLB record for any team for a single season.

⚾ Cardinals, Wednesday: Second team ever to have a winning streak of 17 games or longer snapped in St Louis. The 1935 Cubs are the other.

⚾ Paul Goldschmidt, Friday: With Yadier Molina on July 21, first time the Cardinals have had two walkoff singles against the Cubs in the same season since 1972.

⚾ Logan Webb, Sunday: First Giants pitcher to score 3 runs in a game since Russ Ortiz at San Diego, September 13, 2002.

⚾ Byron Buxton, Thursday: Second leadoff batter in Twins/Sens history to have 3 extra-base hits and score 3 runs in a loss. Brian Dozier did it against the Royals on September 5, 2016.

⚾ Mike Wright, Monday: Second pitcher in White Sox history to face 3 batters in a game; give up a hit, a walk, and a hit-by-pitch; and have all of them score. Terry Forster did it against the Yankees on July 18, 1971.

⚾ Pirates, Fri-Sat: First time posting a 6-run inning in consecutive home games since July 20-21, 2010, against Milwaukee.

⚾ Aaron Judge, Tuesday: Second player in Yankees history with 2 hits, a homer, a sac fly, and 2 walks in the same game. Rickey Henderson did it in a loss at Tiger Stadium on June 20, 1985.

⚾ Christian Walker, Saturday: Second cleanup batter in D'backs history with 3 doubles in a game. The other was Greg Colbrunn, 20 years earlier to the day.

⚾ Bobby Bradley, Friday: First Clevelander with a homer and 4 strikeouts in the same game since Travis Hafner at Chicago, August 16, 2011.

⚾ Bryan Reynolds, Wednesday: First Pirates batter with a multi-triple game since Josh Harrison against Toronto on May 4, 2014. Braves are the only team to go longer without someone doing it.

⚾ Rafael Ortega, Thursday: Second Cubs batter in modern era to hit a leadoff homer and go on to steal 2 bases later in the game. Jerome Walton pulled it off against the Cardinals on April 11, 1989.

⚾ Yankees, Sunday: Second time ever winning their regular-season finale 1-0 on a walkoff. Wid Conroy scored on a wild pitch against Boston on October 10, 1904.

⚾ Jorge Polanco, Wednesday: Hit 3-run homer as Twins' third batter of game. Also did that August 16, 2018, against Detroit. Only others in franchise history to do it multiple times are Larry Hisle, Tony Oliva, and Kirby Puckett.

⚾ Hunter Renfroe & Bobby Dalbec, Friday: First Red Sox batters to hit back-to-back homers in Washington since Reggie Smith & Rico Petrocelli, September 17, 1971.

⚾ Christian Vazquez, Saturday: First go-ahead triple in the 9th later for the Red Sox in Washington since Dom DiMaggio, July 6, 1940.

⚾ Rafael Devers, Sunday: First Red Sox batter with a multi-homer game in Washington since George Scott on September 27, 1970.

⚾ Jason Castro, Tuesday: Third pinch hitter in Astros history to "eat shrimp" (i.e., draw a game-winning walk). Others were Dave Magadan in 1995 and Ken Oberkfell in 1991.

⚾ Jason Castro, Friday: Second #9 batter in Astros history with 3 hits and 3 RBI in a loss. Milt Thompson did it against Pittsburgh on June 30, 1995.

⚾ Matt Duffy, Sunday: First Cubs batter with multiple go-ahead singles in the same game in St Louis since Bobby Thomson (yep, the same one) on May 11, 1958.

⚾ Angel Zerpa, Thursday: First pitcher to make his MLB debut with the Royals, allow 0 earned runs, and still eat a loss.

⚾ Amed Rosario, Monday: Became first Cleveland batter to have six 4-hit games in a single season since Joe Carter in 1986.

⚾ Tigers, Sunday: Second game in team history with 2+ doubles, 2+ triples, 2+ sac flies, and 2+ stolen bases. Other was a 9-1 win on April 23, 1982, at Yankee Stadium.

⚾ Shohei Ohtani, Wednesday: First Angels DH to bat leadoff, have 2 hits, and steal 2 bases, since David Eckstein vs Boston, August 22, 2001.

⚾ Paul Sewald, Saturday: Second pitcher in Mariners history to allow 3 runs and blow a save, but then strike out 3 and get a win. Bob Wells did it against the Yankees on May 31, 1999.

⚾ Luis Robert, Tuesday: First White Sox batter ever to have a multi-homer game against the Reds (home or road, including postseason).

⚾ Trea Turner, Fri & Sun: First Dodgers batter to hit two grand slams in three days since Mike Piazza, April 9 & 10, 1998.

Programming note: Our posts continue through the postseason but will not necessarily be on Sunday nights. Look for one at the conclusion of each round, or possibly the day after same.