mlb-playoffs Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
That's Why The Yankees Bet On Gary Sanchez
Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez had an awful year. He endured multiple stints on the DL, hit .186/.291/.406, and played unsustainably bad defense behind the plate. If the Yankees hadn’t made the playoffs we might be settling into conversations about whether the former rookie sensation still has a place...
Clayton Kershaw's Tiny Adorable Kid Offers Good Take On Her Dad's Dominant Performance
Clayton Kershaw pitched a two-hit gem last night for the Dodgers, blanking the Braves over eight strong and efficient innings of work. It was easily the best postseason outing in Kershaw’s decidedly snakebitten playoff career, as he needed just 85 pitches to dispatch 24 batters. After Ronald Acuña s...
Beer-Covered A's Fan Made Peace With Beer Throwers And Partied With Them
Oakland A’s fan John Spencer had a rough night on Wednesday, when he saw his team get clobbered in the wild card game by the Yankees and then had beer poured all over him. His sad plight was captured on video, and it reverberated with a nation now wearily accepting the prospect of yet another Yankee...
This October, Root For Your Coworkers' Misery
The Nationals are despicable and I hate them, and anyway they’re out. The Orioles were the lousiest team in living memory this year. As a baseball fan in and from the broader D.C. area, I’m stranded in these playoffs, with no obvious rooting interest—except one: the joy of my dear coworkers’ sadnes...
Adam Ottavino Overthought It
During the regular season, Rockies reliever Adam Ottavino worked 36 at-bats to an 0-2 count. Hitters went 0-36 against him in those situations, and 31 of them ended up as strikeout victims. It’s hard to understand, then, how this happened:...
Hernan Perez Went On A Gatorade Odyssey And Got The Wrong Guy Anyway
The vagaries of walk-offs and crowd dynamics meant that when Mike Moustakas singled in Christian Yelich to win Game 1 for Milwaukee, the dugout chased Moustakas, eventually settling in right-center field, where the Brewers jumped, slapped, and celebrated. One problem with that: It’s a long way to go...
Yep, Max Muncy
Hyun-Jin Ryu pitched seven dominant innings, and the Dodgers walked a whopping eight times against Braves pitchers, but it was late-blooming-ass, rags-to-riches-ass, minor-league-veteran-ass Max Muncy who dealt the heaviest blow in Thursday night’s 6–0 Dodgers win over the Atlanta Braves, in Game 1 ...
Brewers' Big Name Acquisitions Come Through In Game 1 Walk-Off Win
The Brewers got nine innings of excellent pitching in a 10-inning game, and won on a walk-off single in extras from Mike Moustakas, to grab Game 1 of their NLDS matchup with the Colorado Rockies....
Yankees Further Endear Themselves To Boston By Crossing Hotel Workers' Picket Line
Marriott hotel workers are striking in Boston, San Francisco, and San Jose this week. Unite Here Local 26, the union representing the striking hotel workers in Boston, has organized its members around the slogan One Job Should Be Enough, and after months of negotiating with Marriott, last month 96 p...
Jon Gray's Strange Season Looks To Have Reached A Depressing End
Back in April of 2017, Rockies pitcher Jon Gray was the team’s Opening Day starter, and seemed destined to become the franchise’s future ace. Today, it was announced that he has been left off the Rockies’ NLDS roster....
The Hater's Guide To The MLB Playoffs
The baseball season gets much stranger as it narrows down in October, which is not a novel observation but is one that is already proving itself out. Before we even recorded this week’s Deadcast, a Wild Card game had been decided in the dead of night on a hit by a backup catcher who was one of the ...
This Is Supremely Fucked Up, Don't Do This
Here we have a Yankees fan, excited because the baseball team he roots for is winning, throwing the majority of his beer onto another person for the apparently sole reason that the other person is a fan of the other baseball team. Really fucked up!...
Beefy Baseball Boy Luke Voit Is The Yankees' Not-So-Secret Weapon
Luke Voit is a meaty midwestern lad who can’t or won’t button up his jersey all the way and whose grandmother still sends him $25 for every home run he hits, and there have been a lot of $25 checks from Nana in the last couple of months....
Athletics' Feel-Good Season Smashed Up And Ruined By Vile Yankees
The Athletics had a fascinating regular season, and were a ton of fun to follow, and it would’ve been neat to watch a genuine underdog that got to this point in such a weird and surprising way go up against the powerhouse Red Sox in the ALDS. Alas, the dream died Wednesday when the Yankees smashed u...
Kyle Freeland Is A New Kind Of Rockies Pitcher
By the time last night’s interminable NL wild card game was over, your memories of the contributions made by Rockies starting pitcher Kyle Freeland, a second-year player throwing on three days rest, may have understandably faded. A quick refresher: 6.2 innings, four hits, one walk, six strikeouts, a...
The A's Are Full-On Bullpenning, So Let's Get Weird
The Athletics’ full plan for tonight’s AL wild card game was revealed not when Bob Melvin named reliever Liam Hendriks the starter—though Hendriks prefers the term “opener”—but when Mike Fiers, one of two true starters, was left off the roster for this game. That leaves only Edwin Jackson, and he’s ...
Brave Rock Men Thwart Pesky Bear Children In NL Wild Card Slog
Some might remember Tuesday’s NL Wild Card game as classic, cagey postseason baseball. Others may describe it as a painfully slow and annoyingly long slog that lost all of its charm the very moment the ninth inning ended without one team ahead of the other. The luckiest among us will remember it as ...
Javier Baez And Nolan Arenado Share Warm Hug During Live Baseball Play
The Cubs and Rockies refuse to settle this goddamn National League Wild Card game, which is now in the 13th inning. The Cubs had a good chance to end it in the bottom of the 11th, after Javy Baez advanced to second on a sacrifice bunt and the Rock men elected to intentionally walk Daniel Murphy with...
Clayton Kershaw's Quotes About Postseason Failure Are Killing Me
The narrative of Clayton Kershaw’s playoff failure was always something bigger and more intense than it had any logical right to be. It conveniently ignored key context of managerial decisions and bullpen strength, not to mention brushed aside the number of perfectly fine and even good postseason st...
The Dodgers Had Their Shots
There’s always a postmortem. Where did they go wrong? What should they have done differently? Analyzing a game—a baseball game, a World Series Game 7—is like dwelling on any other thing in the past: It’s in a fixed state. It happened, it’s not changing, and at some point you swallow it and move on....