Regular season success is no guarantee of playoff victories
So what should Toronto Blue Jays make of Philadelphia Phillies' post-season run?
When the Toronto Blue Jays' season ended after their wee little bunt of a playoff run, one of the popular post-mortem opinions was that they lost due to a lack of pitching and defence.
You don't win in October with offence. There's a premium on preventing runs when bats inevitably go cold, that kind of thing. It's a common theory, and I can't blame anyone for offering it. When unexpected sports things happen, those of us in the media usually try to explain why. “Pitching and defence” sounds better than “Who the hell knows?”
But with the Major League Baseball playoffs now whittled down to two teams, score one for Team Who the Hell Knows.
The Houston Astros are no mystery. They've been good for ages, won 106 games this season and are a model franchise, minus the cheating scandal. The Philadelphia Phillies? A bit harder to explain.
The Phillies came into this season having taken a poor defensive team and made it significantly worse in that department. They signed Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, two no-glove mashers, to round out a lineup that seemed designed to hit home runs and then hold on for dear life. How many men shaped like a fire hydrant could one team start? The Phillies were about to find out.
It worked, to a point. Philadelphia scored the seventh-most runs in the majors and hit the sixth-most home runs. The pitching wasn't great — 18th in earned-run average — and the defence was worse, 25th in the majors in defensive runs saved.
Interestingly, Philadelphia made a bunch of errors early on, but reduced them drastically in the second half of the season after a strategic change that came about in part because of a managerial switch, with Canadian Rob Thomson replacing Joe Girardi.
Infield coach Bobby Dickerson told Sports Illustrated the Phillies put on fewer defensive shifts and stressed the importance of making routine plays over attempting the dazzling ones.
That sounds like the kind of advice you'd give to a Little League team — and possibly Toronto shortstop Bo Bichette — but the Phillies did finish the season with the fifth-fewest errors in MLB. They weren't saving a bunch of runs with their defence, but they weren't causing many of them.
All that added up to 87 wins and a third-place finish in the National League East, which wouldn't have been enough for the playoffs in any non-shortened season until this one, with the post-season field expanded to 12 teams.
And, of course, a team built on power hitting, with average pitching and below-average defence, has gone 9-2 in the playoffs to reach the World Series.
Baseball is weird. There's no specific explanation for what the Phillies have done.
They started their playoffs with a six-run rally in the ninth inning to beat St. Louis. They started the NL Championship Series with a 2-0 win over San Diego in which both runs came via solo homers.
They haven't been overwhelming, but have done enough in the margins. In the playoffs, sometimes that's all it takes. Which is a lesson of sorts for the Toronto Blue Jays — and every other team.
Baseball finds itself at a strange point in its history, where after years of expansion there is a dichotomy between the long grind of its regular season and the chaos of October's small-sample playoffs.
Building a team to maximize wins in the former is no guarantee of success in the latter.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have made the playoffs for 10 consecutive years and won the World Series once, in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
The New York Yankees have been to the post-season 18 times since 2001 and also won one championship during that time.
At the other end of the payroll spectrum, the Tampa Bay Rays have made the playoffs eight times and have yet to win a World Series. This season, they played 22 post-season innings, gave up three runs, and lost two of two games to end their run. Pitching and defence wins in the playoffs, you say?
There will be years in which that is the case. But this season, 10 of the 11 MLB teams with the best pitching staffs by earnedrun average made the playoffs. Nine of the 10 are out, with just Houston left.
The Jays will look to upgrade their pitching in the off-season, because despite all of the weird playoff outcomes, the one certainty is that reliable bullpen arms become far more important in October than they are in May.
But unless something unexpected happens, they will still be a team defined by its offence. That never works, until it does.