Developing Four Division Series, Four Answers to the Same Question, and Three of Them Looked Wrong Inside an Hour

Jackson Chourio is 22 years old. On Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee he stood in against a 101.3 mph fastball with two outs in the ninth, two runners on and his team a strike away from being 1-1 instead of 2-0, and hit it up the middle past Jake Cronenworth's diving backhand. Two runs. Brewers 4, Padres 3.

The pitcher was Mason Miller, who has the best arm in the series and was being asked to do something he had not done since 2024: record six outs in a save. He got three of them in the eighth without incident. Then a leadoff groundout, then a walk to Christian Yelich, then a walk to Sal Frelick — the first two postseason walks of his career, back to back — and then Chourio.

That at-bat is the cleanest illustration of what the first two days of this postseason have been about, which is not hitting and is not really starting pitching either. It is the question of how long you let a pitcher work, asked four times in four series, answered four different ways, and answered wrong in at least three of them.

Atlanta started a reliever and it was the right call

Walt Weiss did not plan to hand Game 2 to Ray Kerr. Chris Sale was lined up on four days' rest until Atlanta needed the last four outs of Thursday's wild-card Game 3 and Sale got them. "It wasn't the plan," Weiss said afterwards. "Believe me."

So Atlanta played a bullpen game against the Dodgers in Los Angeles and won it 3-2. Kerr got eight outs. Five more relievers followed him. Didier Fuentes, the youngest arm in the sequence, retired nine consecutive hitters with a fastball that touched triple digits before Max Muncy got him for a two-out, two-strike solo home run in the ninth that made it close and nothing more. Raisel Iglesias ended it.

The runs came from Michael Harris II twice, both times with two out: a triple in the fifth that scored on a Kris Bubic wild pitch, and an RBI double off Edgardo Henriquez in the seventh. Atlanta scored three runs on two swings from one player and a ball that got away.

The series is 1-1 and Sale now starts Game 3 at Truist Park, with Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow still waiting behind him. Weiss burned his ace to survive a wild-card round and got the Game 2 he did not want. He also got the win.

Los Angeles lost a game to five walks

Blake Snell faced the first four hitters of the game and walked three of them. Mauricio Dubón singled with two out to make it 1-0 and that was, in effect, the whole afternoon. Snell went 3⅔ innings, allowed one run on three hits, and walked five — his shortest postseason start since his San Diego days in 2022.

Behind him, the Dodgers went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position and left seven on. Shohei Ohtani went 1-for-4 with two strikeouts and has now been a non-factor in consecutive games. A team built to out-slug the structural problems of October has scored eight runs in two games and lost one of them to a bullpen that used six pitchers.

Tampa Bay let its starter finish the sentence

The counter-example is in the American League, and it was the best-pitched game of the weekend. Drew Rasmussen took a no-hitter into the eighth inning against the Yankees, struck out ten, walked two, and retired fifteen straight. Austin Wells finally doubled down the right-field line with two outs in the eighth — and was then thrown out at third, which is the kind of detail that decides a 1-0 game.

The run came from Jonathan Aranda, who put a 2-2 Gerrit Cole changeup several rows into right-centre for the first postseason hit of his career. Rays 1, Yankees 0, in two hours and thirty minutes.

That is what the alternative looks like: a manager who had no leverage decision to make because his starter removed the need for one.

And Cleveland did not get the chance to make one

Chicago's 3-0 win at Progressive Field was the other Game 1 shutout. Munetaka Murakami hit a 440-foot two-run homer in the fourth and Colson Montgomery doubled in the seventh. Five White Sox pitchers combined on three hits, with Hagen Smith retiring the first eight he faced. Cleveland drew five walks, left seven men on, and went 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position.

These two clubs have both been in the American League since 1901 and had never met in the postseason until Saturday. They meet again tonight in Cleveland.

The objection, which is a good one

You cannot grade a bullpen decision by its outcome. That is the first thing any competent analyst says about the Miller inning, and it is correct. Bringing your best reliever into the highest-leverage spot available is the process the research supports, and the process does not become wrong because a 22-year-old squared up 101. Run that eighth and ninth a thousand times and San Diego wins most of them. Mike Shildt would do it again, and should.

The same defence covers Dave Roberts leaving Snell in to face a fourth batter in the first, and it partly covers Weiss, who had no good options at all.

Where we think the defence runs out is in the aggregate. Five of the first six Division Series games were decided by two runs or fewer; four of them by one. Every postseason staff in this bracket is now constructed to get twelve to fifteen outs from the bullpen every night, and the schedule — Sale throwing in a wild-card Game 3 on Thursday and being unavailable on Sunday — keeps colliding with that construction. When the margin is one run and the arm is the fourth one you have used, the quality of the decision stops being the dominant variable and the depth of the roster starts being it.

That is not a criticism of any one manager. It is the shape the sport has taken. The team that wins a series like this will be the one whose sixth-best reliever is good, not the one whose best reliever is great.

What tonight tells us

The Yankees go to Tampa tonight down 1-0 with their offence having produced nothing, and the Guardians host Chicago in the same position. Both home teams in the National League are on the road from here: Milwaukee leads 2-0 and goes to San Diego on Tuesday, where the Padres need to win three in a row against a club that has now beaten them twice by a single run while committing three errors in one of the games.

Watch the fifth and sixth innings rather than the ninth. That is where these four series are being decided, and it is where every manager in them has already been wrong once.