Starting Pitchers Are Having Their Moment Again This Postseason. Well, Sort Of.

We're nowhere near the Golden Age of the Ace, but more starters are having lights-out performances than in recent playoffs.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s start against the Milwaukee Brewers in Tuesday’s NLCS Game 2 was nothing short of a masterpiece. The diminutive right-hander needed only 111 pitches to throw a complete-game 3-hitter against the league’s fifth-best scoring offense from the regular season, striking out 7 Brewers while walking just 1 and allowing only a single extra-base hit — Jackson Chourio’s home run on his first pitch of the ballgame. It was the first complete game in the MLB postseason since Justin Verlander in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS — eight years earlier to the day.

And yet, as sparkling as Yamamoto’s outing was, it wasn’t even the best by a Dodger pitcher in that 2-day span — as teammate Blake Snell’s own 1-hit, 10-strikeout start in eight shutout innings scored slightly higher (90 versus 83) according to Game Score, a Bill James metric that rates pitcher starts on a roughly 0-100 scale using various stats from their outing. Snell’s 90 was the first to break that barrier since Cliff Lee’s matching score in Game 3 of the 2010 ALCS, on October 18, 2010.

So we’re talking this October about starting pitching performances the likes of which we hadn’t seen in a while beforehand. And it’s not just the Dodger aces: Earlier in the playoffs, we saw Cam Schlittler of the Yankees throw an 84 — the second-best elimination game start by a pitcher aged 24 or younger in MLB history — and then three days later, Toronto’s Trey Yesavage spun a 78, meaning two of the best young starting performances ever happened in the same week. Add in multiple 75+ Game Score outings by Tarik Skubal, a 78 from Garrett Crochet and more gems by Snell and Tyler Glasnow against the Phillies… and you get the idea.