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One instant classic. One rather-boring rout. And where the heck are the Rays going to play next year, anyway? I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal. Welcome to The Windup!
ALCS Game 3: A(nother) chaotic October classic
Guardians 7, Yankees 5: How many “Game of the Year” candidates can one postseason contain?
For the first seven innings, it looked like a perfect blueprint for a Guardians win: get an early lead, then let your bullpen squeeze the life out of the Yankees lineup. Cleveland even got an insurance run in the sixth to make it 3-1.
After that, it became theater. Frenetic, combustible theater.
With the league’s best closer on the mound, and its best hitter at the plate, the immovable object gave way to the unstoppable force. Aaron Judge’s opposite-field home run off Emmanuel Clase tied the game, 3-3. And then, with the dam breached, Giancarlo Stanton made it back-to-back homers to take the lead.
(Side note: If you’re a fan of baseball symmetry, you’ll love this: As Tyler Kepner pointed out, Judge’s home run landed in the same spot as Sandy Alomar’s game-tying home run off Mariano Rivera in 1997.)
In the bottom of the 8th with two runners on, Yankees manager Aaron Boone made the same call Stephen Vogt had: bring on the closer in the 8th inning. Luke Weaver escaped the jam temporarily. But his fate was the same as Clase’s, just delayed an inning. Down 5-3 with two outs in the ninth, Jhonkensy Noel blasted a monster home run to tie the game, send it to extra innings, and launch ten thousand Christmas memes.
Enough drama? No? How about this play in the 10th inning by Andres Giménez and Josh Naylor?
WHAT A PLAY BY GIMÉNEZ 😳 pic.twitter.com/Lxfz7GTxAz
— B/R Walk-Off (@BRWalkoff) October 18, 2024
And then came the finisher — not the typical Guardians blueprint, but not unprecedented this postseason — a David Fry home run, this one a 10th-inning walk-off to put the Guardians in the win column for the first time this series. They’re still alive.
The madness continues tonight with Game 4: Luis Gil vs. Gavin Williams (8:08 p.m. ET, TBS).
More from this game: “Feliz Navidad!” Jhonkensy Noel’s Game 3 ALCS homer inspires epic Spanish radio call.
Ken’s Notebook: Dodgers just too much for Mets
No Freddie Freeman, Tommy Edman in the cleanup spot, Andy Pages and Chris Taylor batting eighth and ninth. And still the Los Angeles Dodgers scored 10 runs.
As many suspected, the Dodgers-San Diego Padres matchup in the Division Series was for the National League championship. The New York Mets are not as talented or as deep as the Padres. The Dodgers in four games have outscored the Mets, 30-9.
A path exists for the Mets to rally from a three-games-to-one deficit. Win an all-hands-on-deck bullpen game behind David Peterson and Kodai Senga in Game 5. Wreck a Dodgers bullpen game for the second time this series in Game 6. Prevail in a winner-take-all Game 7 that would feature a rematch between Luis Severino and Walker Buehler.
OK, the chances of all that happening seem rather slim.
Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts, the Dodgers’ 1-2 hitters, were on base a combined eight times in Game 4 on Thursday night. Max Muncy tied Reggie Jackson’s postseason record by getting on base a 12th consecutive time. Edman hit a pair of run-scoring doubles, improving to 7-for-16 in the NLCS.
Yet, for all their individual achievements, the Dodgers are most dominant as a collective, as evidenced by their 31 walks in the series, the most ever in a four-game postseason span. True, Mets pitchers issued the third highest number of walks in the league during the regular season. But this is less about the Mets than it is about the Dodgers, who had the league’s second-lowest chase rate. Grinding pitchers is part of their organizational DNA. And the alternative for the Mets pitchers – throwing more strikes – isn’t such a great idea, considering the Dodgers are batting .333 (16-for-48) with a .942 OPS with runners in scoring position in the series.
The Dodgers on Thursday night joined the 1960 New York Yankees as the only teams in National League/American League history to win three games by eight-plus runs in a single postseason series (the Yankees did it in the World Series). The Mets take pride in their rotation, which ranked fifth in the majors in ERA after the All-Star break. In this series, their starters have worked 14 1/3 innings in four games.
One more stat to consider: Per Sarah Langs, the Dodgers’ +21 run differential is the highest ever by a team in the first four games of a postseason series.
If the Mets somehow win the next three games, it will be one of the most stunning turnarounds in playoff history. No one should count on it. The Dodgers are just too good.
Ideas Time: Where will the Rays play in 2025?
A couple of days ago, we linked to a story from the Tampa Bay Times reporting that Tropicana Field’s roof won’t be ready for Opening Day next year. In it, Marc Topkin lays out the possible options:
- One of the many minor-league fields in the area. It’s an option that makes sense from a geographical standpoint, but it comes with challenges: not only would there be scheduling conflicts, but none of the fields have a roof either. How big a problem is this? Well, rainy season in Florida is six months long. The wrong six months.
- They could slide across the state and room with the Marlins for a while, which would solve the weather issues, but not the schedules. It’s possible there would be numerous day/night doubleheaders with four different teams involved.
- Remember a few years ago when there was a tentative plan — since scrapped — to play half the season in Montréal? The downside: Rays fans would have a hard time watching their team in person. The upside: Expos City Connect jerseys, c’mon, make this happen.
But the one I want to see most is the one that MLB almost certainly wouldn’t allow. There’s a recently vacated MLB stadium across the country in Oakland. There’s a fanbase in the area who loves baseball and just had their team ripped away. I think the funniest possible outcome would be for the Rays to play in Oakland in 2025 and for fans in Oakland to foster the team, if for no other reason than to prove to John Fisher and MLB that it was a viable market all along.
Another NLCS Note: Blowouts can still produce fun facts
Due to the dominance Ken described above, this NLCS has been kind of boring.
Sure, the Mets grabbed a win in Game 2, but even that was a 7-3 game that was 6-0 after the second inning. The Dodgers’ wins — 9-0, 8-0 and 10-2 — have been excellent showcases of Los Angeles’ talent, but have lacked any semblance of intrigue.
Not so fast. Fortunately, we here at The Athletic share a workspace with Jayson Stark. That’s right, this is a series that only a Weird & Wild writer could love. And this series has, in fact, featured some oddities.
Grand slam improbabilities? Got you covered. Kiké Hernandez tying Babe Ruth for postseason home runs and Ohtani’s absolutely impossible runners-on-base stretch? Consider it done. The Ohtani-and-Betts duo making history? You know Jayson’s on it.The Dodgers are now one win away from an NL pennant. Jack Flaherty will do the honors, while David Peterson tries to keep the Mets’ season alive (5:08 p.m. ET, FS1).
Handshakes and High Fives
The Astros have a lot of tricky decisions to make this offseason. Chandler Rome suggests that one consideration should be trading Framber Váldez.
J.T. Realmuto will be 34 years old in 2025. Matt Gelb examines (among other things) the question: is it time to give him a few more days off behind the plate in Philadelphia?
Keith Law has been in Arizona watching the Fall League. He reports back with what he’s seen so far.
Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Yu Darvish in the same game? It’s no surprise that Game 5 of the NLDS was watched by more people in Japan than any MLB game before it.
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(Top photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
