Four teams remain, each with a 25 percent chance to win the World Series. If you ask them right now, they’re all feeling like they have a 99.99 percent chance of winning it, and that’s just so adorable.
The New York Mets will face the Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League pennant. The New York Yankees will face the Cleveland Guardians for the American League pennant. In a couple of weeks, three of these teams will have nightmares and regrets. One of them will have confetti in their hair. It’s cruel, but so is this sport.
Here’s what we learned from the Division Series in both leagues.
The Dodgers will go as far as their bullpen takes them
The book on the Dodgers was that they were going to have to hit their way to a championship, and that hasn’t changed. They might have taken Game 5 with a pair of solo homers in a crisp 2-0 game, but they aren’t going to average two runs a game in the NLCS and still win the pennant.
Except, I dunno, maybe they can?
A list of Dodgers relievers who didn’t allow a single run in the NLDS:
• Evan Phillips (4 1/3 innings pitched)
• Blake Treinen (3 2/3 IP)
• Michael Kopech (3 1/3 IP)
• Anthony Banda (3 IP)
• Alex Vesia (3 IP)
• Daniel Hudson (2 1/3 IP)
• Landon Knack (1 IP)
Michael Kopech, 102mph Jet Fuel. ⛽️ pic.twitter.com/xTOonN9cI6
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 12, 2024
One blow-up mixed into that group, and the Padres might still have a chance at their first World Series title. That’s over 20 innings of bullpen perfection, though, and championship teams have been built out of less.
It’s not like all of these guys are coming out of nowhere, either. Three of them have been closers. Hudson has fought his way through fire and swamps to come back from all sorts of injuries, including two Tommy John surgeries, so he shouldn’t be intimidated by a seventh-inning outing in a silly NLCS.
Yu Darvish reminded everyone that good pitching can limit any team, even the stacked Dodgers. He pitched brilliantly and made as many mistakes as (if not fewer than) Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The Dodgers can counteract that if their bullpen is perfect or close enough. If the lineup is scoring eight runs, like they did in Game 4, it’s not going to matter much. If it gets taut and tense, though, they’ll need another flawless series from at least five of the seven relievers who were perfect in the NLDS. — Grant Brisbee
Mark Vientos is this close to becoming a household name
We’re talking about households that watch baseball on purpose, mind you. The majority of normal households still think Derek Jeter is active, and half of them think he played for the Cowboys. Forget about those objectively misguided-if-normal households. Focus on the baseball sickos. They might have Mark Vientos in their heads more over the next two weeks than they have in their entire lives.
Vientos was a second-round pick out of high school in the 2017 MLB Draft, and he was just 17 in his first professional season. It’s been a bit of a slog since then, as baseball careers often are. He was challenged with a promotion to Double A after the minor leagues resumed in 2021, and he kept hitting and hitting wherever he was assigned … except for his brief cameos in the majors in 2022 and 2023. The strikeout-to-walk ratio was always a bit suspect, so it didn’t seem that out of place to struggle against big-league pitching. Maybe he was just a quad-A hitter?
Seems unlikely at this point. Vientos hit 27 homers in just 111 games in the regular season, and he powered the Mets into the NLCS with a silly .563/.611/1.063 slash line in the postseason, with two doubles and two homers. His sense of timing was impeccable, as well, which is important for a Mets team that likes to wait to score until the late innings and give their fans a good scare, just for the heck of it.
Don’t melt down the bronze for his Cooperstown plaque just yet — he had just three singles in three games against the Brewers — but pay attention to his at-bats. The Mets needed more than Brandon Nimmo, Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso to get this far. Here’s one of the guys who helped. — Brisbee
Giancarlo Stanton still has a chance to become a Yankees legend
The reason we’re not already sick of the tedious discourse about Aaron Judge’s clutchability or mental toughness is that we didn’t need to go there. Judge had a patient but quiet ALDS, and his career postseason numbers are still closer to Didi Gregorius than Mickey Mantle. An early exit from the postseason would have made that a much bigger deal than anyone wanted.
The reason the Yankees’ season didn’t end that early, though, is because of another extremely large slugger. The Yankees have paid Giancarlo Stanton just under $200 million over the past seven seasons, and he’s had more than 1 WAR in just two of them. He’s averaged 1.3 WAR in those seven seasons, and he hasn’t had a truly good (or healthy) season since 2021. The odds were overwhelmingly in favor of him being a symbol of what went wrong with the Yankees if they didn’t win a championship during his tenure.
Giancarlo Stanton’s go-ahead blast last night was his 12th career #postseason home run! 💥
(MLB x @GoogleCloud) pic.twitter.com/TSDvDtZG7u
— MLB (@MLB) October 10, 2024
The odds are still in favor of that legacy if the Yankees don’t win, but the ALDS gave a glimpse into an alternate universe, one where Stanton is feted as much as Scott Brosius and Aaron Boone (the player), if not some of the more prominent heroes of the franchise. Stanton had the most important hit in the series according to the nerd stats, an eighth-inning homer that broke a 2-2 tie in Game 3 and gave the Yankees the series edge, and he added an insurance RBI in Game 4. He also stole a base, which inspired the heck out of me, so I can’t imagine how it affected the Yankees’ dugout.
He’s a 1-for-18 with 10 strikeouts away from being an all-time Yankees dud in the court of public opinion, to be sure. But with another good series and some well-timed dingers, he could be the face of the whole postseason. It’s what the Yankees have been waiting for this whole time. — Brisbee
The great version of Steven Kwan is back for the Guardians
On June 19, Steven Kwan, the Guardians’ lithe left fielder, collected two hits and raised his batting average to .397. The scorching, Ichiro-esque pace was one reason the Guardians sprinted out to a 51-26 record, building enough cushion to hold off the field in the AL Central. Kwan would go on to bat .352 during the first half before a precipitous fall after the All-Star break. He hit just .206 in the second half, a decline that might have been caused, in part, by back soreness that eventually landed him on the injured list in September.
Well, guess what: It looks like the rest did Kwan some good. Because he’s back to being a terror at the plate.
Kwan finished 11-for-21 (.524) against the Detroit Tigers in the American League Division Series, coming one hit short of matching the aforementioned Ichiro Suzuki and Edgar Martinez for the most hits in one ALDS. He had three hits in Game 5, including one during a five-run fifth inning against Tarik Skubal. He also scored six runs across five games. He was everywhere.
We know about the historic nature of the Guardians’ bullpen. We also know about José Ramírez, who has been so criminally underrated for so many years that, well, he’s probably just about properly rated among baseball fans at this point. But if Kwan is going to keep going crazy at the plate, that’s something to bookmark. After handling the red-hot Tigers, the Guardians suddenly look more like the team that put the American League on notice in the first half. That’s a team that could give the Yankees trouble in the ALCS. — Rustin Dodd
(Photo of Steven Kwan: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)
