The postseason is about entertainment, not education. Pit two good teams against each other in a short playoff series, and anything can happen.
But with this pause in the postseason prior to the start of the World Series between the Astros and the Phillies on Friday night in Houston, there are a few takeaways from the first few rounds of this tournament that feel firmer than others.
Here are five things we’ve learned in October.
1. Bryce Harper has a growing Cooperstown case
To be clear, we are not anointing Bryce Harper a Hall of Famer because he hit the pennant-winning home run that sent the Phillies to their first World Series since 2009.
But moments like that will matter one day when we sit down to deliberate Harper’s final Cooperstown case.
As it stands, Harper has decent footing as a two-time MVP with 42.5 career WAR (per Baseball Reference) through his age-29 season. In the live ball era, only 62 other position players amassed that high a WAR prior to their age-30 season, and 46 of those 62 are in the Hall of Fame (the still-active Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Manny Machado and Evan Longoria are among the exceptions).
The key, of course, will be longevity. But a productive playoff career can also augment the argument, and Harper has padded that particular profile by slashing .419/.444/.907 in 46 plate appearances this postseason. His 1.351 OPS is the highest of any player in this field with at least 20 trips to the plate.
Harper has now played seven postseason series in his career and gone deep in six of them, with a .997 OPS overall (18th all-time among those with 75 postseason plate appearances, just ahead of Albert Pujols’ .995 mark). We can debate whether Harper’s been “overrated” or “underrated” or properly rated over the course of his career, and we’ll get deeper into the weeds in the Hall of Fame discussion whenever he hangs ‘em up. But the bottom line, for now, is that Harper has been a significant player in his generation, and he has shown an ability to rise to the October occasion.
2. Starting pitching is not dead!
Didn’t it seem like we were trending toward a day in which every postseason game is a bullpen game? Big thanks to guys like Zack Wheeler, Joe Musgrove, Shane Bieber and Luis Castillo for reminding us what deep October outings looks like.
We’ve had 11 instances this postseason in which a starter has gone at least seven innings. That’s as many as in the ’16 playoffs and more than in ’17 (10), ’18 (nine), ’20 (eight) and ’21 (four).
Furthermore, we’ve already had more starter innings in this year’s postseason (341 1/3) than last year’s (293), despite six fewer games being played so far. Last year’s World Series teams both got significantly more innings from their relievers than from their starters:
This year’s pennant winners have, so far, flipped that particular script:
And note that the Astros’ starter total exceeds their relief total despite having played an 18-inning game against the Mariners in the American League Divison Series.
Starters are performing better, too. Last year, they had a 4.55 ERA. This year, it’s 3.85.
Obviously, roles last year were impacted by the pandemic having cut the 2020 season short. But the 5.02 innings per start so far this postseason are also more than in ’17 and ’18 (both 4.7).
3. PitchCom works!
Given the heightened importance of each pitch, it is only natural that the game slows down in October. But in recent years, postseason games would basically grind to a halt whenever a runner reached base (especially second base), as paranoid pitchers and catchers switched up their signs.
In this postseason, that reduction is even more pronounced. The average time per nine innings in 2021 was 3:37. This year, it is 3:21.
Couple PitchCom with next year’s adoption of the pitch clock, and we’ll have all the drama of October with none of the lag.
4. The Yankees have serious work to do
Understandably, the Dodgers once again falling flat in October has led many to surmise that the sky is falling in their world and that their recipe for success needs to be altered if they hope to win another championship, having just one title to show for their 10 straight postseason appearances.
But the October demise of a 111-win team that lost its ace (Walker Buehler) and fell in a best-of-five series can more easily be chalked up to postseason randomness than what we witnessed from the Yankees. New York needed the full five games to take down a fun but super young and offensively flawed Guardians team in the ALDS and then was beaten in every facet of the game while being swept in the AL Championship Series by the Astros — the team that has taken them down three times in six seasons.
It says here that the Yankees are the juggernaut in clearer need of an internal inspection, because their warts — including an over-reliance on Aaron Judge, who struggled in October and, of course, is now a free agent — showed up not just in the playoffs, but also when they went .500 in the second half of the season.
For as many resources as the Yankees have, they do not have nearly as many developmental and international success stories as the Astros do. The Yankees have also made some fiscally frugal free-agent decisions — notably, abstaining from the Harper and Machado markets prior to 2019 and the deep shortstop market this past winter (instead trading for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who wound up getting benched for part of the postseason) — that now look regrettable.
Again, it is often unfair to draw broad conclusions from the results of short playoff series. But for as good as the Yankees are — and you have to be quite good to have 30 straight winning seasons — they have not met the standard that they set for themselves.
5. The Astros are a force of nature
We don’t need to know the result of this World Series to know that the Astros are so much more than some trash-can-banging 2017 fluke. They’ve proved that in the recent past, and they’ve proved that again this October.
When you win consistently in MLB, you draft lower, your good players become more expensive (and sometimes, as a result, sign elsewhere in free agency) and you often have to deplete your farm system to make trades to fill big league needs. The Astros have had all that happen. As a result of free agency, they lost Carlos Correa and George Springer and Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton and others. As a result of the self-inflicted scandal, they lost Jeff Luhnow, A.J. Hinch and Draft picks.
Social media being what it is, some people will continue to harp on the extreme and illicit measures the Astros once took to steal signs. But that condemnation rings hollow given how much the Astros’ roster and the broader electronic environment has changed since 2017. Even in the PitchCom era, there’s been no stopping the Astros.