The Playoffs Pivotal Players

This baseball season is so strange that if it were a duck it wouldn’t be a different colored duck or a slightly larger duck or a duck with polka dots. It would be a giraffe. No baseball season in history has been stranger in form and function than what we’ve collectively experienced here in 2020. The season has been both short and condensed. The playoffs are both as well, in addition to be longer and larger. Yes, the playoffs are short, long, condensed, and large. No, you figure it out.

(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)

Fittingly this has been a season where some star players looked like far less than their normal star-level selves. Christian Yelich won the MVP two years ago and finished second last season. His output this year looked a lot more like it came from the player he used to be early in his career with Miami, rather than the superstar he’s become in Milwaukee. Yelich’s batting average fell 124 points, his on-base fell 73 points, and his slugging fell 241 points. Two-hundred forty-one points!! Reigning MVP Cody Bellinger wasn’t exactly bad so much as he was mortal. This stands in stark contrast to his 2019 season. Bellinger lost, in 2020, 66 points of batting average, 73 points of on-base percentage, and 174 points of slugging percentage. Normally, a bad 50 games is a rough third of a season, with over 100 games to go to make things right, but in 2020, nope, that’s all you get. Thanks, see you next year. 

Except it’s not really ‘see you next year,’ not yet. The playoffs, the super weird bigger/smaller/longer/shorter playoffs are here. Probably with murder hornets and screaming presidential candidates. God help us all. Getting through these playoffs is going to require skill, depth, and a measure of luck never before required of any World Series champion. Here now I offer you a few pivotal players, guys whose performance can make the difference between their teams hoisting a trophy or going home early. 

Mookie Betts

It sounds weird to say but Betts has never been a good post-season performer. Now, please understand, this is small sample size theater in the extreme because we’re talking about 21 games compared to almost 4,000 sparkling games in his regular season career. Betts is undoubtedly a superstar (probably shouldn’t go trading superstars, Red Sox, but that’s another 750 articles for another time), but it’s true he’s had a rough go of it in the playoffs. In his career, Betts has hit .227/.313/.341 in the playoffs. In the 2018 World Series against the Dodgers, Betts managed a paltry .217/.308/.391 slash line including the only homer he’s ever hit in the postseason. This is all to say that one day Mookie Betts is going to turn it on something fierce and opposing pitchers should probably duck and cover. Also, it should be noted that Betts carried the Dodgers offensively this season, as he was as valuable by WAR as Corey Seager and Cody Bellinger put together. In short, a good postseason from Betts and the Dodgers might be unbeatable, but another mediocre performance and another brilliant season in LA will go unrewarded. 

Josh Hader

If the Brewers are going to defeat the Dodgers, and let me be clear here: they are NOT going to do that, then they need Josh Hader to be incredible. Hader had a down-by-his-standards regular season in 2020. His ERA was up, his strikeouts were down, and his walks were up. That up, down, up is a bad roller coaster. Hader was still good, in the technical sense of the word, but the Brewers need Hader to be great in order to beat the Dodgers, and especially now with rookie reliever Devin Williams on the shelf for the whole first round of the playoffs (and maybe more) with an arm injury. It’s not like the Brewers were stacked with pitching (or, really, batting either) before losing Williams, so the need for Hader to step up and fill both their roles is even greater. And with Betts and the Dodgers on the other side of the field, well, I’m not sure even the old Great Hader from a few years ago is enough, but it’s probably Milkwaukee’s only shot. 

Masahiro Tanaka

For as great as the Yankees were at the start of the year, and for as great as the Yankees were as the year closed, and for as great as the Yankees were in our minds as we imagined a regular 2020 baseball season without cardboard cutouts of your uncle Ralph in the stands for playoff games, their starting pitching was never really that good. Gerrit Cole can front any rotation in baseball, but after that things got less good in a hurry. James Paxton wasn’t good then was hurt because, as you will note from the beginning of this sentence, he’s James Paxton. J.A. Happ isn’t very good and wasn’t very good (though wasn’t the tire fire he could have been). After that, well, after that things were left up to Masahiro Tanaka. Tanaka, whose shoulder, not unlike our democracy, has been hanging by a thread since 2016, struggled to begin the year before putting together a good run to close things out. If the Yankees are going to do anything this post-season obviously they’ll need Cole, but beyond that, someone has to pitch their Game 2s (Games 2?), and that someone is going to be Tanaka. He did not pitch particularly well against Cleveland in Game 2 yesterday, but that didn’t stop the Yankees from winning. Having a big offense helps, but there will be games that Tanaka will be counted on to perform. Without him, the Yankees probably don’t have the starters to make any kind of sustained run. 

Kris Bryant

Like Bellinger, Yelich, and many, many other members of my fantasy team, Bryant struggled mightily this season, especially compared to previous seasons. Unlike those two though, Bryant wasn’t Bad For Kris Bryant, instead he was just plain old bad. He missed a significant portion of the season with injuries, then barely hit over .200, didn’t get on base over .300, and managed only 10 extra base hits, four of them home runs, in 34 games. The Cubs rode their 10-2 start to the regular season, and actually never improved on that the rest of the way, finishing 34-26, the same eight games over .500 they were after 12 games of the season. This was in large part due to struggling offensively as a team, which was in some part, due to Bryant himself. But we know, like the others named in this paragraph, that Bryant is better than he’s shown this season. The old All Star Kris Bryant anchoring the Cubs lineup through the post-season would be a huge boon to the team’s chances, certainly compared what they’ve got from Bryant so far this year.