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Marlins 5, Cubs 1: An Auspicious Start for Miami
The Miami Marlins are the only franchise to be perfect in the postseason. The regular season is more of a problem; the Marlins usually have a losing record. But when they win, they make it count — both of their postseason appearances, in 1997 and 2003, ended with a World Series title.
Their long-awaited third quest has a long way to go. But it started the right way on Wednesday, with a 5-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs in their playoff opener at Wrigley Field. The Cubs, who hit just .220 as a team in the regular season, managed a homer by Ian Happ and just four other hits. Starter Sandy Alcantara worked six and two-thirds innings, and closer Brandon Kintzler — who pitched for the Cubs the last two seasons — got the last three outs.
The Marlins, who had no winning seasons in the 2010s and went 57-105 last season, scored all the runs in the seventh inning, with the big blows coming from veterans acquired as bargain free agents last winter. Corey Dickerson chased Kyle Hendricks with a three-run homer, and Jesus Aguilar connected for a two-run shot off Jeremy Jeffress.
The Cubs, who try to thrive on the festive, communal energy for playoff games at Wrigley, noticed the difference with empty stands.
“You miss the fans; it isn’t the playoff atmosphere you’re looking for,” Manager David Ross said, adding that he was responding to a question and not raising the issue himself. “This year’s unique and I’m not trying to make excuses. That’s not a playoff atmosphere, but it’s playoff baseball in 2020.”
To save their season on Thursday, the Cubs will start Yu Darvish against Marlins’ Sixto Sanchez, a rookie right-hander from the Dominican Republic. Sanchez has the number 45 tattooed on his neck in honor of his idol, Pedro Martinez, and he’d do well to imitate Martinez’s playoff debut. With Boston in 1998, Martinez worked seven innings with eight strikeouts and no walks in an 11-3 romp over Cleveland.
Braves 1, Reds 0: Freddie Freeman Ends It — Finally
We might have guessed that the Reds and the Braves would play a game like this. The Reds had not advanced in the playoffs since 1995, the Braves since 2001. For 12 innings in their opener on Wednesday, it seemed as if neither team quite knew how to win.
The Braves finally did, on a Freddie Freeman single in the 13th inning. By then, the game had already achieved a distinctive place in history: Never before had a postseason game been scoreless for so long. The teams also combined for a record 37 strikeouts in the game — five more strikeouts than the total for the 1976 World Series, when the Reds swept the Yankees.
This was a noon game that stretched until rush hour, and the early star was long gone when it ended. The Reds’ Trevor Bauer worked seven and two-thirds innings, with 12 strikeouts, no walks and two hits allowed. Three relievers followed, stifling the Braves until Freeman — a leading candidate for N.L. most valuable player — dumped an Amir Garrett pitch into center field, scoring the pinch-runner Cristian Pache. Nick Markakis had started the rally with a single off Archie Bradley.
In the regular season, teams started extra innings with a runner on second base in an effort by Major League Baseball to speed games along and keep players from getting overworked during the pandemic. The rule is not in place for the postseason, but the Reds must have wished it were.
The Reds scored nearly 60 percent of their runs on homers this year, the highest percentage of any postseason team. Without a long ball on Tuesday, they were almost utterly hopeless to score. They failed repeatedly against starter Max Fried, who worked seven innings, and the seven relievers who followed.
The Reds ran into outs on the bases against Fried in the sixth and seventh, then stranded a combined eight runners in the 11th, 12th and 13th. They have lost 12 of their last 14 postseason games — not quite as futile as the Minnesota Twins, but close.
Astros 3, Twins 1: Twins’ Postseason Misery Continues
Sports is full of shining examples of postseason heroics and repeated championship runs, from the Yankees to the New England Patriots and the Chicago Bulls.
On the other side of that ledger are the long championship draughts and epic losing streaks strung together by teams like the old Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Browns.
The Minnesota Twins just added a new one to the list this year, and it will not be broken until at least 2021.
The Twins fell to the Houston Astros, 3-1, in Game 2 of their American League wild card series at Target Field in Minneapolis on Wednesday, and Minnesota was eliminated from the postseason just 48 hours after it started.
The loss extended the Twins’ postseason losing streak to 18 games, extending a record among the four major North American sports. They set that unpleasant record the previous day by losing Game 1 of the series and passing the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, which lost 16 straight playoff games from 1975 through 1979.
The Twins last postseason victory came in Game 1 of the 2004 division series against the Yankees, and they have not won a postseason series since they beat the A’s in the 2002 division series.
But this year was supposed to be different, if only because the Twins avoided their perennial nemesis, the Yankees. What’s more, the Twins came into the series with the second-best record in the American League, and also had the best home record in baseball, going 24-7 at Target Field without losing consecutive games at home all year.
Once again, it did them no good in the playoffs. They scored only two runs in the series, with no home runs, and just three hits in Game 2.
The Astros, meanwhile, advanced to another division series, where they will play either the Chicago White Sox or the Oakland Athletics. This year, they are playing the role of party crashers, whom no one wanted at the dance.
A Marathon Day of Playoff Baseball
It is Day 2 of the 2020 Major League Baseball postseason, and it is a doozy: An orgiastic, 13-hour baseball-a-thon, with an unprecedented series of eight playoff games on a virtual conveyor belt of high-stakes action.
It starts at noon Eastern time in Atlanta, with the next five games scheduled to begin every hour until the Yankees play in Cleveland at 7 p.m. Eastern time, and it lasts until the final pitch is thrown in Los Angeles between the Dodgers and Brewers, probably around 1 a.m., and half of them will be elimination games.
“It’s going to be crazy,” said Chicago White Sox pitcher Dallas Keuchel, who will pitch in the third game of the day against the Athletics in Oakland. “It’s almost kind of like a jumbled mess.”
Tuesday was the warm up-act, when baseball turned the page from an abbreviated regular season to an expanded postseason. There were four American League playoff games scheduled Tuesday, starting with the Houston Astros against the Minnesota Twins in Minneapolis.
But on Wednesday, when the National League joins the fray, the curtain will rise on the main stage for what may more closely resemble the early days of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament than a traditional day of playoff baseball.
“March Madness is one of my favorite times of the year,” said Dusty Baker, the Astros manager, who is leading his fifth different team to the postseason. “This is like September Madness.”
Wednesday’s Schedule
(All times Eastern)
Reds at Braves, 12 p.m. (ESPN)
Astros at Twins, 1 p.m. (ESPN2)
Marlins at Cubs, 2 p.m. (ABC)
White Sox at A’s, 3 p.m. (ESPN)
Blue Jays at Rays, 4 p.m. (TBS)
Cardinals at Padres, 5 p.m. (ESPN2)
Yankees at Indians, 7 p.m. (ESPN)
Brewers at Dodgers, 10 p.m. (ESPN)
Game 8 Preview: Brewers at Dodgers
The Dodgers have by far the most to lose of any team in this postseason. They’ve won eight N.L. West titles in a row but have grown weary of the inevitable caveat: They haven’t won a championship since 1988. They had the majors’ best record this season (43-17) and face the first N.L. playoff team ever with a losing record: the 29-31 Brewers.
Milwaukee made it in despite a puzzling season from Christian Yelich, who had won the last two league batting titles but slipped to .205 (though he led Brewers regulars with a .356 on-base percentage). The Brewers will start lefty Brent Suter tonight, but will probably change pitchers often, deploying lefty Josh Hader in high-leverage spots. But they will be without Devin Williams — a rookie right-hander with a baffling changeup he calls the Airbender — because of right shoulder soreness.
The Dodgers will start Walker Buehler, who also started the last time these teams met in the playoffs: Game 7 of the 2018 N.L.C.S., when the Dodgers dashed Milwaukee’s World Series dreams.
Game 7 Preview: Yankees at Indians
The Yankees can advance to the A.L. Division Series with a win over the Indians in Cleveland on Wednesday night. The Yankees took the first game of the series, 12-3, on Tuesday when they clobbered Shane Bieber, the best pitcher in baseball during the regular season.
The Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka (who had a 3.56 earned run average during the regular season) will face off against the Indians’ Carlos Carrasco (2.91 E.R.A.). Tanaka has been a dominant in his postseason career with the Yankees: 5-3 with a 1.76 E.R.A. in eight starts. Opponents are hitting .157 against him in the postseason — the lowest mark in major-league history among pitchers who have made at least six starts.
Should the Yankees fail to advance, it could be Tanaka’s final start in pinstripes; the seven year, $155-million contract he signed before the 2014 season is due to expire.
During the regular season, the Yankees had the A.L.’s highest scoring offense (5.25 runs per game) plus the best on-base-plus-slugging percentage against right-handed pitchers (.811). Carrasco, a right-hander, though, held opponents to a .663 O.P.S.
Game 6 Preview: Cardinals at Padres
This will be the best series to watch, at least visually: the classic birds on the bat of the Cardinals against the brown-and-gold Padres, who finally returned to their original, quirky color palette and instantly made it back the playoffs. Of course, that had more to do with the production of third baseman Manny Machado and shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. (whose father once belted two grand slams in one inning for the Cardinals), the re-emergence of right fielder Wil Myers and a lot of shrewd deals by General Manager A.J. Preller.
Chris Paddack — a hard-throwing, supremely confident right-hander who had a down season — will start Game 1, as Dinelson Lamet and Mike Clevinger were both held out of San Diego’s roster because of late-season injuries. The Padres will get their first look at the Cardinals lefty Kwang-hyun Kim, a 32-year-old rookie from South Korea who goes by “KK,” an ideal nickname for a pitcher, if somewhat misleading for a guy who struck out just 5.5 hitters per nine innings.
Fun fact: the stalwart Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina should become the sixth player to reach 100 career postseason games (he has 98), and the first to do it all for a National League team.
Game 5 Preview: Blue Jays at Rays
These are heady days in the Tampa Bay area. The Lightning just won the Stanley Cup on Monday night, Tom Brady has led the Buccaneers to a 2-1 record in his first year there, and the Rays made good on their No. 1 seeding in the American League on Tuesday with a 3-1 win over the Blue Jays at Tropicana Field.
Tampa, which went 40-20 in the regular season, hands the ball to Tyler Glasnow, their tall right-hander who will be making his first postseason start since last year’s debacle in Game 5 of the A.L. division series against the Astros in Houston. In that game, he gave up four runs in two and two-thirds innings, which in retrospect was an early indication of Astro sign-stealing via illegal means at Minute Maid Park. The Rays were clearly worried about it, because Rays catcher Travis d’Arnaud used three sets of signs even when there were no Astros runners on base. But Glasnow reported after the game that it was his fault because he had been tipping his pitches. It could have been both.
Today, Glasnow squares off against Hyun-jin Ryu, who has pitched well in his first year with the Blue Jays. Ryu also pitched twice against the Rays in Tampa this year, and the Jays went 1-1 in those games.
But things have changed since then. Now it’s Title Town Tampa.
Game 4 Preview: White Sox at Athletics
Oakland’s terrific regular season, in which they tied for the third-best record in baseball and earned a No. 2 seed in the American League, is all on the line today when they face the Chicago White Sox in Oakland.
The White Sox blasted the A’s, 4-1, in Game 1 on Tuesday as Tim Anderson’s warning about lefties proved accurate. Anderson noted before Game 1 that perhaps the A’s “didn’t do their homework” because they started the lefty Jesus Luzardo, and Chicago rakes left-handers. The Sox went 14-0 against lefties in 2020, and their O.P.S. was .887, compared to .749 against right-handers. And it was a pair of righties, Jose Abreu and Adam Engel, who homered off Luzardo.
Oakland makes a correction in Game 2 as Chris Bassitt — a right-hander who was drafted and came up to the big Leagues with the White Sox — starts against his old organization. He did not put much credence in Anderson’s comments, saying before Game 1, “I don’t give a damn what you did against lefties. These three games are what matters.”
If the A’s don’t show improvement, though, they might not even get to a third game.