This article was originally published on October 3, 2024.
Baseball is always unpredictable, and never more so than in the postseason. That’s been a favorite saw of baseball lovers for decades, and even as the increasingly close, scientific observers of the sport have built ways to better understand and project it, they’ve also ratcheted up the rhetoric on that point. Arguably, the most important contributions of the analytical movement to our grasp of baseball is the transparency and bluntness the drivers of the movement have offered about the limits of their power. We have lots of tools for guessing how baseball might go, but baseball has even more ways of subverting our perfectly well-founded guesses. The best baseball writers and model-makers are the most insistent on this point, especially every fall, when the playoffs come.
There’s one key caveat to that, though, and it often goes unsaid—or maybe even unnoticed—by otherwise savvy people. The caveat is: playoff baseball is more unpredictable than regular-season baseball, but not because the same things that make regular season baseball unpredictable get magnified. True, the samples are small, but that’s not really why playoff baseball is unpredictable. It’s unpredictable in a whole different way than the game played from April through September. The stakes, in October, are very high, so there’s no unpredictability based on the gentle massaging of workloads, or the modulation of effort. On the contrary, some of the randomness of October comes from just how hard everyone on the field is concentrating and trying, and the way that pushes performances toward extremes.
Every team has also prepared exhaustively for every game, and every player has attended carefully to what they’ve been told in the meetings before series and games. We might treasure the imagined reality in which that’s the case throughout the regular season, too, but it just isn’t. Many, many players focus on a particular flaw in their swing, on a given day, and don’t have the bandwidth for big adjustments based on advance scouting reports. Besides, they don’t want to change something that’s been working based on one matchup. Two days later, they’ll be in a new city, facing a new team, and the matchup for which they might have made that change will be a fading memory. In the postseason, everyone is willing to try something new—as long as they know how to do it.
Thus, when the Tigers got a runner aboard in the top of the eighth inning Tuesday, Matt Vierling stepped in willing to do something a bit different. Kerry Carpenter had singled, and he represented the tying run. In the previous half-inning, the Astros had come back to take a 2-1 lead, so the Tigers were now staring down Houston’s ‘A’ bullpen, with five outs to go to stave off a Game 3 in which they would have had to try to cobble together another bullpen day’s worth of good pitching performances. Ryan Pressly stood astride the rubber.
On the first pitch, Pressly is willing to throw you a fastball. It’s about the only time you can reasonably hunt one. He only throws the heater about 43% of the time on 0-0, but unless you get ahead of him 3-0 or 3-1, you’ll only get less likely to see anything straight from there. Vierling very, very rarely swings on the first pitch, though—just 18.4% of the time this year. He also doesn’t necessarily need to hunt heat. For a right-handed batter, he handles right-handed breaking stuff quite well. In fact, he’s more likely to pull the ball in the air on breaking balls than on fastballs, and he doesn’t whiff very often on it. It was a situation where the Astros had plenty of reason to expect Vierling to take the first pitch, and where Vierling had every reason to wait and see what a 1-0 or 0-1 pitch might look like. The Crawford Boxes beckoned, and a home run would have put Detroit ahead.
Pressly, therefore, came right in with a fastball over the white of the plate. Vierling, however, swung. Not only that, but he swung in a way he hardly ever swings on the first pitch: short, inside-out. He pulled half his batted balls on the first pitch this year, easily the highest rate for him by count. He hardly ever hit ground balls to the right side of the infield early in counts, which is why the Astros were swung around to the left. This time, though, he did. In fact, he crushed the ball, 107 miles per hour off the bat and past second baseman Jose Altuve, racing to his left. Since the start of July, Vierling had hit exactly two balls 105 miles per hour or more to the right side of second base. The third sparked a Detroit rally, and it was only possible because Vierling knew what to look for and radically changed his usual process.
After a wild pitch, a strikeout, and a walk, the game was tied and the Astros turned the ball over to Josh Hader. That’s another thing that can make playoff baseball unpredictable in a different way than regular-season ball : Even though he’s now free of the self-imposed rules about usage that guarded him until he reached free agency, Hader probably would not have come on in that spot had this game been played in June. Players sometimes take on responsibilities or roles in October that weren’t even thought of during the regular season. Hader walked Spencer Torkelson, though, to load the bases. That brought up Andy Ibanez.
This is another way the postseason gets complicated. Sometimes, it makes things more predictable, and sometimes less so, but it’s always a factor: Adrenaline gets the better of you in October. It can take your rational thought process right off the rails. See, Josh Hader knows better than to throw Andy Ibanez a bunch of sinkers in a row. Ibanez is only on the Tigers roster because he crushes left-handed pitchers. A lot of teams wouldn’t even carry him; his utility is too limited. But A.J. Hinch kept him around all year because he crushes left-handed pitchers, and he especially crushes left-handed pitchers’ fastballs. In an admittedly small sample, Ibanez had a 1.230 OPS against southpaw sinkers this season.
Yeah, Hader might fairly have thought, but that’s not my sinker. Not by accident has Hader become one of the most dominant relievers of his time, and his sinker took multiple years just to be properly identified, because when you look at its movement, it’s much, much more similar to most pitchers’ four-seam fastballs. In fact, if you create reasonable error bars around his average induced vertical break and horizontal break, you can find that Ibanez only saw 19 pitches like Hader’s sinker all season, and that 13 of them were four-seamers. Half of the remaining six came from Drew Smyly. The other half came from Hader himself.
On one of those sinkers, though, in the ninth inning of a game back in June, Ibanez did this.
So, if they thought about it carefully and made sound decisions, Hader and catcher Yainer Diaz would have arrived at the conclusion that Ibanez can even hit that sinker, and that they had better mix in a slider or two. He got ahead 0-2, then 1-2. Ibanez fouled off a pitch. Then, on the fifth pitch, he lined the game-winning, bases-clearing double into the same corner where he’d thundered that previous double. In the whole at-bat, Hader never threw him anything but sinkers.
It would have been foolish to predict that the Tigers would beat the Astros in this series. They had to face Framber Valdez, and could have had to face Yusei Kikuchi. Given the necessary strictness of Hinch’s platoon treatment of Carpenter and the way Valdez and Kikuchi could partially neutralize Riley Greene, it was sure to be an uphill climb to score runs. Meanwhile, the Tigers’ patchwork pitching corps would have to hold down a Houston lineup whom we’ve seen dominate seven straight postseasons, to varying degrees. To expect this result, you had to anticipate things that can’t be reasonably anticipated: things like Matt Vierling changing his approach altogether, Andy Ibanez getting just the right opportunity to tilt the series, and Josh Hader giving him exactly the pitch he needed to do it, five times in a row. It’s a whole different kind of chaos than the regular season can offer us, rather than a mere difference of degree—and it’s fun as hell.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now