The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

The baseball playoffs have started…

According to Andy Williams (and if you’re under 105-years-old you’ll probably have to google him) The Most Wonderful Time of the Year is Christmas and I hate to disagree with Andy, but for me The Most Wonderful Time of the Year is right now.

That’s because it’s no longer a billion degrees outside and it’s not yet freezing ass with a wind-chill factor of 120 below and the baseball playoffs have started which means there are meaningful baseball games being played pretty much every day and I’ll do my best to watch all of them.

And speaking of watching baseball…

A lot of people find it boring, but the more you know the more interesting it becomes and since I’ve got some time on my hands before I go watch tonight’s game, I’ll try to make it more interesting and today we’ll talk about the difference between regular season games and playoff games.

And we’ll start with the biggest one…

You have to win right now

If you believe in making baseball decisions based on numbers from the past you probably want a big sample size because that large sample size will overwhelm the Aberrations and Anomalies (which, as Dave Barry might say, would make a great name for a band) and you’ll then have a better idea of what happens in most baseball games.

Let’s say you’ve got a philosophical approach that emphasizes on-base and slugging percentage which you’re convinced will win you 90 regular season games and put you in the playoffs. But you’re still going to lose 72 games, so during the regular season when you lose one of those 72 games you don’t freak out.

But during the playoffs you can’t afford to be patient.

You might have to win right now tonight and you don’t give a rat’s ass what happens in most games, you care (or should care) about what’s happening in the game you’re playing at the moment.

Which means being competitive no matter what kind of game you’re playing.

Yesterday, the Cleveland Guardians eliminated the Tampa Bay Rays in a 15-inning game and the final score was 1-0, so being able to manufacture a single run was a big deal. The day before that, the San Diego Padres beat the New York Mets 7-1, so the Mets needed to score runs in bunches.

Which is why most players and coaches think teams that are versatile tend to have the best chance during the postseason; they can play whatever style of baseball is required at the moment.

And now a completely-biased word about that.

If you ignore the sacrifice bunt, it might not be there when you need it  

If you’re a baseball fan you probably already know small-ball tactics like sacrifice bunts have fallen out of favor (and if you’re not a baseball fan you aren’t dead to me, but you’re definitely on life support).  In the 2000 season teams sacrifice bunted 1,628 times; in 2022 they did it 390 times.

So you got a lot of teams saying, “We don’t need no stinking bunts.”

(If you’ve ever watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that’s a pretty good joke and if you haven’t, please refer to my previous comment about being dead to me).

So during the regular season you don’t need no stinking bunts, but then you make it to the playoffs and the teams with weaker pitching have been eliminated and the teams that haven’t been eliminated are avoiding their weaker pitchers, the end result is the pitching gets better in the playoffs and maybe one day you find yourself facing some Top-Of-The-Line pitcher having a good night and you’re not hitting home runs or getting three singles in an inning, so you decide maybe it would be a good idea  to use one of your bottom-of-the-order guys (who’s probably going to make an out anyway) to make a productive out and move a runner 90 feet.  

You see it every year: a team that has pretty much ignored the bunt all season will panic and try one in the playoffs.

Here’s the deal on that:

The only way to get good at bunting is to do it during games because you can practice bunting all day off a pitching machine or a 57-year-old coach throwing BP and it still won’t prepare you to bunt off a guy who throws 98 and isn’t real sure where the ball is going.

So when you see a guy attempt a bunt in the playoffs and suck at it, don’t automatically assume the bunt’s a dumb play (in the right situation it’s not, but that’s a completely different article). Instead, ask yourself how often the sucky bunter did it during the regular season.

And speaking of sucking…

Start times might suck

If you’re trying to cram four games into a single day and make sure they overlap as little as possible so they all get good TV ratings, somebody’s getting a shitty start time.

Which can be a problem because at some point the pitcher will be in the sunlight and the batter will be in a shadow and your eyes have a hard time adjusting from a blindingly white baseball to one that’s a dark blur which might be headed for your lips.

I’ve asked pitchers what’s better to throw when you have the shadows helping you – a fastball or a breaking pitch – and the answer varied depending on the pitcher, but the one thing they all agreed on was: work quick while the hitters can’t see. So a pitcher who takes his time delivering pitches while the batters are half-blind, is making a mistake.

Shadows played a big part in that 15-inning game being scoreless for the first fourteen-and-a-half innings.

More scouts

As teams get eliminated there are fewer games to watch so more scouts from each team are watching the games that are played and having all those eyes on a team might mean someone spotting something that one set of eyes would have missed.

Which can be a big deal.

I heard a story about someone who was watching the games figuring out that the real signs weren’t being given by the opposing team’s manager; they were being given by a coach leaning on the railing and the opposing team deciphered the signs fairly quickly and knowing what your opponent is about to do next is kinda helpful.

Just ask those World Champion Cheaters, the Houston Astros.

More media

The same thing that happens with scouts happens with the media: there are fewer games to cover so more reporters show up for the remaining games and the longer a team plays the bigger the media crowd and before long the media is affecting the games and how players prepare.

During the two World Series I covered most players avoided the clubhouse while the media was allowed inside because there were dozens of reporters who needed to justify the expense of their trip by getting interviews and I made the mistake of saying hi to a player I knew pretty well and then walked off, but the rest of the media saw me talking to that player and if a player was talking to a writer they wanted an interview and 20 minutes later I walked by the same player and he was still getting mobbed by the media and he looked at me and said:

“See what you did?”

During the World Series there were so many reporters standing around waiting to interview someone, that if you sat in the dugout you couldn’t see the field. To avoid getting detained and delayed, ballplayers would run through the media crowd like they were returning a punt against the Green Bay Packers because if they slowed down even a little bit someone would want to talk to them and then they’d be stuck doing interviews instead of preparing for the game.

The most important games of the year and those of us in the media manage to fuck them up.

The crowds are bigger and louder

The first time I went through a postseason I knew I was tired after 162 games and all I did was sit in the press box and eat free ice cream.

So I asked some players I knew pretty well where they were getting the energy to play an extra month of baseball and they all said the crowd: ballparks are packed and the energy level is high and the players feed off that.

Which is a pretty good deal until it isn’t.

During the postseason, smart players insulate themselves because people they went to high school with and third cousins are going to call up and want tickets and to hang out if possible.

Postseason veterans will tell postseason rookies not to get caught up in all that stuff because they need to focus on baseball more than ever and if someone you took American History with in high school, but haven’t talked to since, thinks you’re a dick because you didn’t get him a ticket, so be it.

So far we’re talking about off-the-field distractions, but on the field the large crowds are louder than usual and that means it can be difficult to hear the player next to you calling for the ball. If you see players miscommunicate, it might be because they couldn’t hear each other.

Worth noting:

Teams will try to make money any way they can and field-level scoreboards generate revenue, but can be really shitty backgrounds for seeing a baseball or a baseball player and I once had a third base coach tell me he couldn’t see the right fielder once he was up against a brightly lit scoreboard, so the coach used the crowd’s reaction to decide whether a ball had been caught.

OK, I’ve got lots of other postseason stuff I could talk about, but this thing is long enough as it is and I hope it gave you some things to think about as you watch playoff baseball which you ought to do because, as you’ve already heard, it’s:

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.