Baseball Bytes: What I’ve Got My Eye On in the League Championship Series
MLB's Final Four features twin battles with something for everyone.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I point out 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!
⚾ Two Leagues, Similar Stories
Now that MLB’s Final Four is finally settled, we have a pair of LCS battles featuring roughly 60-40 odds, according to the Playoff Predictor model:
📊 2024 MLB Playoff Predictor 📈
The favored Dodgers and Yankees are hardly perfect teams — L.A.’s rotation is a mess, while N.Y. is slow around the bases and still smoothing out its bullpen problems — but they were also two of the three clear World Series favorites going into the postseason. (Sorry, Phillies.) So even in a down year for MLB superteams, it’s no surprise to see these two leading the remaining pack here.
The Mets and Guardians, by contrast, looked less imposing on paper during the regular season. New York needed to overcome a 24-35 start to the year — turning things around with the help of a fast-food mascot — just to barely make the playoffs on the last day of the season, then upset the favored Brewers and Phillies to get to the NLCS. Cleveland had more of a pedigree as AL Central champs, but they have been confounding the stats all season — a big reason why they seemed vulnerable against Detroit in the Division Series and are underdogs here.
Even now, the Guardians rank just 12th in the Elo ratings, behind a handful of teams who either didn’t make the playoffs at all or were eliminated several rounds ago. But they are still playing and those other teams aren’t — a testament to the ability of Jose Ramirez, Steven Kwan, Tanner Bibee, Emmanuel Clase and company to win their division and then outlast the Tigers in an epic series.
Here are the season-long Elo arcs for all four teams in the LCS round:
Another thing that’s really interesting (to me, at least) is that we have four different types of teams in the LCS.
At least, that’s according to this cluster analysis I did back in late September. Gathering a bunch of stats for each World Series team since 1969, I fed those numbers into a K-means clustering algorithm to see how it would identify different “archetypes” for MLB champs. The method landed on four different flavors of champion:
Complete Champs - Teams with high overall run differentials who were good on both offense and defense relative to the league.
Heavy Hitters - Teams who were more reliant on offense than pitching and defense.
Mound Masters - Teams who were more reliant on pitching — particularly in the starting rotation — than hitting.
Scrappy Winners - Teams who were good but not great during the regular season, but won in October anyway.
With Los Angeles beating San Diego in the NLCS, it guaranteed that baseball’s 2024 Final Four would have one team from each archetype — the Yankees (Complete Champs), Dodgers (Heavy Hitters), Guardians (Mound Masters) and Mets (Scrappy Winners):
Which archetype will prevail? Here are a few of my thoughts going into each series…
⚾ NLCS: 🌴 Dodgers vs. 🍎 Mets
Favorite: Dodgers (60.3 percent)
Tale of the Tape:
Star Wars
⭐ Best player in series: Shohei Ohtani, LAD (9.2 WAR)
⭐ Opposing best player: Francisco Lindor, NYM (7.4 WAR)
⭐ 5+ WAR players: LAD 1, NYM 1 | 3+ WAR players: LAD 7, NYM 3
In addition to having the same record as the Dodgers (19-11) over their past 30 games, the Mets have been the hottest team in the postseason, with a 5-2 record and a +2.1 runs per game differential against no easy set of opponents. But the Dodgers, MLB’s best team by Elo, will be their toughest test yet. L.A. won 9 more games than N.Y. during the regular season, thanks largely to a vastly superior offense that averaged 0.52 more runs per game after adjusting for park factors.
Chief among the Dodgers’ lineup threats are the usual big names — Ohtani (even if he did have a mere .623 OPS with 1 HR in the NLDS), Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith, etc. — but L.A. also got big production from the “Hernández Bros,” Teoscar and Kiké, both of whom had an OPS of 1.000 or higher vs. San Diego. With so many bats that can hurt you, it’s really tough to get through this Dodger lineup unscathed across an entire series.
How the Mets pull the upset: Getting more good starts from Sean Manaea and Jose Quintana (who have a combined 1.17 playoff ERA in 23 innings) would be great, and anything out of Kodai Senga is gravy at this point. But the Mets had MLB’s 20th-ranked pitching staff by WAR this season; containing the Dodgers’ dangerous hitters is only so realistic as a goal. More plausible is a big series with the bats of Lindor, Mark Vientos, Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo and Jose Iglesias, plus the other veterans — guys like Jesse Winker, Starling Marte, J.D. Martinez and Tyrone Taylor — who always seem to crawl out of the woodwork in a big moment. The Dodgers have little in the way of consistent starting pitching, and it’s not hard to imagine this Mets lineup — which is averaging an MLB-high 5.4 RPG in the postseason — jumping all over L.A.’s pitching throughout this series.
⚾ ALCS: 🗽 Yankees vs. 🅾️ Guardians
Favorite: Yankees (60.7 percent)
Tale of the Tape:
Star Wars
⭐ Best player in series: Aaron Judge, NYY (11.0 WAR)
⭐ Opposing best player: Jose Ramirez, CLE (6.7 WAR)
⭐ 5+ WAR players: NYY 2, CLE 1 | 3+ WAR players: NYY 5, CLE 5
While most of the games were close — each contest was decided by 2 runs or fewer — the Yankees handled their ALDS business against the Royals with efficiency and focus. Just as one illustrative example: their pitchers led all teams in Win Probability Added during the Division Series. It also had to be encouraging for the Yankees to get strong performances from Giancarlo Stanton (1.132 OPS), Gleyber Torres (.867) and the bullpen (0 ER in nearly 16 innings), all of whom were coming off relatively “meh” regular seasons.
Now New York is favored against another AL Central opponent, one which is only marginally better on paper than the Royals were. (K.C. and Cleveland had almost identical RPG differentials and WAR during the regular season.) The Yankees have the edge in star power — with apologies to Ramirez, both Judge and Juan Soto (8.0 WAR) are better than anyone on Cleveland’s roster — plus superior hitting and starting pitching, a formula that explains their advantage in the Playoff Predictor forecast. In their fourth ALCS appearance during this incarnation of the franchise, can the Yankees finally get the win and make their first World Series since 2009?
How the Guardians pull the upset: To leave the Yankees disappointed again, the Guardians have to limit the damage from Judge and Soto, get production from their own big hitters — Ramirez, Steven Kwan, Josh Naylor, etc. — and have their rotation of Tanner Bibee, Matthew Boyd and Alex Cobb try to outduel the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole/Carlos Rodón/Clarke Schmidt trio. (So far, so good: Cleveland’s rotation ERA of 1.96 was far better than New York’s 4.43 mark in the ALDS.) But the real key for Cleveland is to make relief pitching the series’ deciding factor. Although Clase had an uncharacteristic 6.35 ERA in the ALDS, he led a dominant Guardians bullpen with a 0.61 mark during the regular season, and Cleveland’s tried-and-true victory path involves turning over a slim lead to its relief corps and trusting them to slam the door shut.
⚾ So… Who Will Meet in the Fall Classic?
Let’s wrap things up with a list of possible World Series matchups, based on the current odds, along with what the fun narratives of the series might be:
Yankees vs. Dodgers (36.6 percent) - FOX’s ratings dream … Ohtani vs. Judge … Another chapter in the NYC vs. L.A. sports rivalry … Rematch of the 1963, 1977, 1978 and 1981 World Series.
Yankees vs. Mets (24.1 percent) - Subway Series … Another FOX dream … Can Mets get revenge for the 2000 Series? … The rest of the country will find this matchup annoying, LOL.
Dodgers vs. Guardians (23.7 percent) - Rematch of the 1920 Series between the Brooklyn Robins and Cleveland Indians (CLE won 5-2, and no that’s not a typo) … L.A. glamor vs. Cleveland grit … MLB’s 4th-highest payroll vs. its 3rd lowest … Does Dodger validation come at the expense of Cleveland ending its 76-year drought?
Guardians vs. Mets (15.6 percent) - Had a 1.5 percent chance of happening before the playoffs … The Francisco Lindor Bowl … Even more of a payroll disparity than Dodgers-Guardians, yet Cleveland might be favored nonetheless … Cursed team versus cursed team.
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