Pitching Grips

Welcome to our Open Game Thread for the LCS games today. Chat with fellow readers as we watch the Dodgers play the Brewers and the Guardians play the Rays! Only Members can participate, and unlike our usual game chats, your messages will be posted immediately. Our Member community is made up of thousands of incredibly knowledgable baseball fans, and we think this is a great way to follow a game with like-minded baseball enthusiasts. We might even have some FanGraphs Staff drop in and join the fun. Please be courteous to your fellow Members, or you may find your chat privileges revoked. Source * This article was originally published here

A few weeks ago, I led the mailbag with some quick thoughts on the thrilling AL Central race between the White Sox and the Guardians. When I wrote that introduction, Cleveland had just won two of its final three regular-season games against Chicago, and the two teams were tied atop the division. Neither club was all that good, but each was intriguing in its own way. The White Sox, of course, had… Source * This article was originally published here

Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports On the heels of an utterly spectacular Division Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres — a walk-off , a home run robbery, two paternity leaves , oh my! — I found myself chewing on two pervasive thoughts. One: that was a hell of a series, and it really deserved a fifth game. Two: how many other Division Series have been on that level? Since the Division Series’ true birth in 1995 (the 1981 strike led to a one-off set of Division Series that autumn, which then went dormant until the next strike made them permanent) we’ve now had 128 of them, with 41 ending in sweeps and 39 going all the way to a do-or-die Game 5, with the ongoing White Sox-Guardians series becoming the 40th. While early-round series in any sport are bound to have some impossibly stacked rosters beating the brakes off ahead-of-schedule teams that are just happy to be cashing playoff bonuses, the history of the Division Series is also rich with indelible postseason memo...

Welcome to our Open Game Thread for the LDS games today. Chat with fellow readers as we watch four baseball games for the last time all year! Only Members can participate, and unlike our usual game chats, your messages will be posted immediately. Our Member community is made up of thousands of incredibly knowledgable baseball fans, and we think this is a great way to follow a game with like-minded baseball enthusiasts. We might even have some FanGraphs Staff drop in and join the fun. Please be courteous to your fellow Members, or you may find your chat privileges revoked. We are going to open the chat up at 3:30 PM ET and it will remain open until the final out of the Brewers-Padres game. Source * This article was originally published here

Welcome to our Open Game Thread for the ALDS Game 2. Chat with fellow readers as we watch the White Sox at Guardians and Yankees at Rays. Only Members can participate, and unlike our usual game chats, your messages will be posted immediately. Our Member community is made up of thousands of incredibly knowledgable baseball fans, and we think this is a great way to follow a game with like-minded baseball enthusiasts. We might even have some FanGraphs Staff drop in and join the fun. Please be courteous to your fellow Members, or you may find your chat privileges revoked. We are going to have Members Only Game Threads for the rest of the postseason. The next one will be tomorrow, October 6 at 6:00PM. Source * This article was originally published here

Michael McLoone-Imagn Images The Brewers earned a 3-2 victory over the Padres in Game 1 of the NLDS on Saturday. With this year’s presumptive Cy Young winner starting for the Brewers and a former Cy Young winner (and still an above-average starter) going for the Padres, a low-scoring affair was not a surprising outcome. Still, the game script didn’t exactly play out as anticipated. Instead, the contest took on a late-inning feel almost from the beginning, and with both emotions and the leverage index consistently running high, perhaps the best way to tell the story of Game 1 is via reactions sourced from one of the most emotive players in either dugout — Milwaukee outfielder Sal Frelick . The Frelick shown above was struggling to process an unusual double play that he initiated during last year’s NLCS, but that confused sentiment also applies to the experience of watching Brewers starter Jacob Misiorowski allow three consecutive singles during the second inning on Saturday. In o...