Baseball Bytes: On the Razor’s Edge
For the first time ever, each Division Series is locked up at 1-1. Plus, Fernando Tatis Jr.'s playoff revival.
Welcome to another ✨Postseason Edition✨ of Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I dive into several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ State of the Race
We’ve now played eight total games of the Division Series round… and we’re not really any closer to knowing who is going to meet in the League Championships, much less the World Series.
After the Royals and Tigers evened their respective series with the Yankees and Guardians on Monday, each LDS matchup is all knotted up at 1 game apiece. In the nearly 30 years since that round of the postseason became permanent in 1995, this is the first time ever that all four Division Series were 1-1 through their first pair of games:
That leaves us with a pretty serious logjam in the playoff probability forecasts. As of Monday night,2 every remaining team in the postseason — all eight of ‘em — had between a 10 percent (we’ll round the Royals up from 9.7) and 15 percent chance to win the World Series according to the “stats-only” version of my MLB Playoff Predictor, with every LDS matchup sitting between 46 and 54 percent:
Talk about things being on a razor’s edge. And this means the next game in each series will carry some massive implications for the rest of the season.
The theory of the playoffs going in was that there was a Big Three of teams who’d separated themselves from the pack throughout the regular season — the Dodgers, Phillies and Yankees — with the possibility that the Padres (and Astros or Orioles, whoops) would join them conditional on advancing from the Wild Card round. The many upsets of the opening series only seemed to bring this reality into greater focus, as teams who looked less formidable on paper advanced and made the favorites look even more likely to take control.
But that’s why they play the games. And baseball’s penchant for the unpredictable always makes any theories of structure to the proceedings mere guesswork.
The Phillies, Yankees and Guardians — I’m not ready to even declare who the “better” team is between San Diego and Los Angeles — could each turn around and win their Game 3s, imposing a degree of order back on the baseball universe. But the odds are high (roughly 85-90 percent, to be exact) that at least one team who was considered notably beneath their LDS opponent — in terms of talent or regular season résumé — will be moving on, whether it be the Mets, Tigers or Royals.
That’s not necessarily where we thought we’d be after a couple of games in the Division Series. But with a new bunch of de facto best-of-3 series on our hands, anything can happen from here.
⚾ Tatis’ Twists and Turns
To say Fernando Tatis Jr.’s career defies simple narratives is an understatement.
After bursting onto the scene as a rookie in 2019, he bounced back from a season-ending back injury to play like an MVP in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign… then signed a massive 14-year contract, injured his shoulder multiple times, still put up nearly 7 WAR, injured his wrist in a motorcycle accident and was suspended for 80 games after failing a PED test — causing him to miss all of 2022 — came back as a good (but not quite as great) hitter in 2023, was on pace for a better season at the plate in 2024 before another midseason injury cost him 59 games, and returned just in time to warm up for the postseason with 7 home runs in September.
Got all that?
In yet another twist, Tatis Jr. has been powering the Padres’ strong World Series odds in the chart above. In 4 postseason games, he has 9 hits, 2 doubles, 3 home runs, 3 walks, a .643 batting average and a 2.151 OPS. Going back to our friend RE24 (Base-Out Runs Added), Tatis’ performance in San Diego’s 10-2 romp over the Dodgers on Sunday — 3.31 runs added — was the best of his postseason career and the 10th-best game of his MLB career, period.
The Padres looked like a threatening team anyway as the playoffs loomed, and that was with Tatis Jr. missing most of the season’s second half. They have now won 20 of their past 30 games — tied with the Tigers for the best in MLB — and Tatis’ surge down the stretch (and in the postseason) adds yet another X-factor for San Diego’s opponents to be worried about.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
If you’re reading this first thing in the morning on Tuesday, this update will only incorporate the average odds from Elo and SRS ratings; FanGraphs and Vegas will be added later in the day. (NOTE: The table of “stats-only” odds has been added to this story on Tuesday AM.)