While we continue to enjoy the few days of a break between the Division Series and National League Championship Series, we do know that the Dodgers will start Tarik Skubal on the mound in Game 1 in Milwaukee on Sunday, followed by Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 2 on Monday afternoon.
Here are a few other postseason notes, as we wait for Saturday night’s finale of the Division Series, with the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Guardians deciding their ALDS vying for a shot at the Tampa Bay Rays.
A gaggle
of writers at The Athletic offered their thoughts and predictions for the NLCS. Among them was Dennis Lin picking the Brewers to win:
“The Brewers will be fresher than they were a year ago, when the Dodgers swept an exhausted team. In this rematch, Milwaukee will also feature the sport’s most disciplined offense, the hardest-throwing pitching staff and, after Wednesday’s smothering of the Padres, the belief they can win big games on the road.”
Lin referred to the Brewers in NLDS Game 4 at Petco Park, which snapped a record 12 straight postseason road losses, a streak that spanned seven different series. Wednesday’s win in San Diego was the first Brewers postseason road win since Game 3 of the 2018 NLCS at Dodger Stadium. Half of the dozen consecutive road losses for Milwaukee came in Los Angeles.
Links
- Scoring has been down this postseason, with both teams scoring at least four runs in only one of 24 games thus far (Game 4 of Guardians-White Sox on Thursday). Bradley Woodrum at Baseball Prospectus looked at the reasons behind the low scoring and the numbers behind the “magical fourth run.”
- Major League Baseball this week proposed a 154-game regular season plus expanding the Division Series to best-of-7 beginning in 2029, part of its collective bargaining with the MLB Players Association. Jen Ramos-Eisen at their Left on Base newsletter wrote about the proposal and the MLBPA response.
- Former Dodgers center fielder Jim Wynn — the Toy Cannon — was among 10 excellent players Joe Posnanski wrote about at his Joe Blogs newsletter who didn’t receive a single Hall of Fame vote.
