Yesterday I was laid off from my job. It was a corporate restructuring thing, so I got a severance package and continued benefits for a little while. I didn’t care much for that job, and this frees me up to take my professional life in a new direction, which I’ve been craving for awhile. I believe it to be a positive thing, but as a solo provider with a family, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty uneasy about it right now.
I will be looking for new opportunities soon. The dream scenario would be to earn enough with MLB DW and other independent ventures to where I don’t have to go work for another corporation. I’m not sure if that’s realistic, but I’m going to give it some real thought and see where it takes me.
The first thing I’m going to do in the coming weeks and months is move MLB Data Warehouse to a new platform that will give us a better user interface and a ton more customization. I should be able to port your subscriptions over myself so you won’t have to drop this one and add the new one. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll be contacted about that when it happens.
I envision the new place having these changes:
More payment tiers
Fewer external links for tools
I’m thinking it will be like $10/month for the articles, $15/month for article+dashboards+tools, and maybe $25/month for all of that plus the projections, betting stuff, DFS stuff, etc. And there will be yearly options as well that will get you a cheaper per-month rate.
If this works out, I will do a lot more podcasting as well. That’s always something I wanted to do, but I never had the time to dedicate to it.
So we’ll see where this goes. I have no desire to just sit on my hands. I have to be busy and accomplishing things and working towards something. I’d appreciate your prayers and continued support of my work. And if anybody out there needs a person with my skill set for an employment opportunity, I’m all ears!
New Dashboards
I’m spun up a postseason dashboard. It’s the same as the main Tableau that a lot of you use, but with the playoff data.
We also have the updated fScores for all players as the 2026 season has come to a conclusion. That’s all up to date on the app and wherever else you’ve been getting the fScores. But there’s a new dashboard that shows you the preseason fScores and the postseason fScores next to each other.
Those links are below if you’re a paid member.
If you don’t know what the fScores are, you can learn about them here in video pod Tim and I did last year:
We’re doing an episode today going over the most notable changes from this year, so be on the lookout for that. It should be a good one.
Wild Card Round
We have achieved just one game three, which sucks, but we almost didn’t get as the Phillies won game two in dramatic fashion thanks to a 10th-inning bomb from Alec Bohm and three scoreless innings and a win from Andrew Painter. Hopefully that earns Bohm some much-needed appreciation from Phillies fans. It wasn’t a pretty season from the guy, but Aidan Miller was hurt all year so there wasn’t any threat to his job.
Bohm is an unrestricted free agent after this season, and he’s coming off of a sub-.700 OPS season. He was right around where we projected him in power (15 homers), but the batting average fell below .250. His BABIP hit. career low at .269. His career mark is .309, so there will be some projected regression upward in his batting average next year. He’ll be 30 next year and is coming off of a 0.2 WAR season. He was a 1.6 WAR player (per FanGraphs) last year. He had the worst defensive season of his career this year by those WAR numbers, and the bat has never been a difference-maker even at his best. I’m sure there’s a team out there that could use him as an everyday player, but he’s not going to be a highly sought-after free agent, needless to say.
That was an exciting game. Bryce Harper had an embarrassing gaffe in right field on a drop that cost them a couple of runs, but he made up for it with a homer in the next inning, going back-to-back with Schwarber to even the score.
The MVP of the game was Painter. Three huge innings from him as they didn’t have Jhoan Duran available. Maybe that was poor management in game one, I don’t know - hindsight is 20/20. But it worked out, and we’ll see Duran again tonight. Painter’s pitch mix from last night:
Ramped up the four-seam velo and featured his split-change, which worked. That pitch has been awesome for him since he changed it from a split to more of a changeup when he got sent down to the minors. He’s a very, very interesting fantasy player for the future.
I think of Simeon Woods Richardson last year. He was terrible at first, but then he got his splitter going late and pitched awesome in September. That got me interested in him for this year, which proved to be very, very dumb. Painter is obviously a much more talented arm than SWR, and he’s only 23 years old, so it’s not a very good comp overall. But it speaks to the risk of buying into small samples. Just because Painter’s new approach worked for a month late in the year and in the playoffs (so far) doesn’t mean he’s guaranteed to be good next year. But the ceiling is still quite high, and he’ll be featured in the Phillies rotation out of the gate. No questions about that.
Neither team announced a starter for tonight. We theorize that it’ll be Zack Wheeler. He threw six innings on Sunday to get them into the playoffs. So it’s only three full days rest. But in a must-win game, that’s the obvious choice as long as his arm feels ready for it. Aaron Nola would be the other option, and they might end up using both guys to get back to Duran.
This was the problem with the Braves roster coming in. They got great outings from Chris Sale and Tyler Mahle, but it wasn’t enough to avoid this game three spot where they’ll have to basically use a bullpen game. My guess is that you’ll see Grant Holmes and/or Martin Perez early in the game, with a quick move to that strong bullpen.
Their bullpen usage so far:
Two days in a row Iglesias, but just 16 total pitches. Robert Suarez has not pitched despite being on the roster. He missed most of the second half, but did come back to throw an inning on September 23rd and another on the 26th. But he gave up a run in each with no strikeouts. They clearly don’t have much confidence in him right now, or we would have seen it. It’s probably a situation where he’s not healthy, but they just gave it a try late to see if he could be there for them.
In a normal situation we’d say that Didier Fuentes would be unavailable tonight. That’s less sure in the playoffs, but this is the first time he pitched on back-to-back days, so asking for a third day after 21 pitches last night does not seem like something they’ll do.
You’ve gotta give the advantage to the Phillies tonight, even on the road. They’re a slight favorite on DraftKings; Polymarket has it exactly even:
If you’re on Polymarket, join the MLB DW squad with this link. Some of us are in there chatting and doing some buying and selling. And I get a kickback if you join the squad and/or sign up and deposit with that link. So shout out to me. I’m unemployed now, so these are the degenerate depths I’m tempted by.
But the starting pitching advantage belongs to Philadelphia so long as we hear that Wheeler is available.
The White Sox, Yankees, and Padres swept with relative ease. Just a really embarrassing result for the Astros, who couldn’t even get Hunter Brown out of the first inning. The White Sox offense took it to them in those two games, and they don’t have all that tough of a matchup next as they face the Guardians. And they’ve earned a home playoff game. Who would’ve seen that coming after they lost 116 games just two years ago! That’s the fairy tale underdog story a lot of people are going to be rooting for. It’s tough not to pull for them.
The Yankees now find themselves as the AL favorite. Getting through the Wild Card round and having that rotation will do that.
They’ll go to Tampa to take on a well-known opponent. The Rays won the season series 7-6, and they’ll have the valuable home field advantage. But Cole + Rodon + Schlittler + Fried is a lot better frontline pitching than what the Rays have. Tampa’s roster just does not seem built for the playoffs to me, but they won a whole bunch of games this year, so what do I know?
Curt Schilling wouldn’t seem to be a believer in the Rays.
Or would he? Is the Rays’ approach considered “sabermetrics”? Shouldn’t the word be “SABRmetrics”? SABR is a freakin’ acronym, after all. It has nothing to do with an actual saber.
You never know what people are specifically talking about when they talk about sabermetrics or analytics. Those are broad terms.
Schilling is wrong, but you can get what he’s saying. He’s a retired player, he grew up and played in the age of “gut feelings” and traditional management ideas.
But what we’re talking about when we speak of analytics is just using the probabilities to make the optimal in-game decisions. The rules of baseball don’t change in October. The math doesn’t stop being the math.
Small percentage differences don’t show up in small samples. They are most notable and useful when looking at the 162-game season. But that doesn’t mean that you should abandon what the probability says in favor of some “gut feeling” now that the individual game means a lot more.
The approach does change. A lot of in-game decisions in the regular season have tomorrow and next week in mind. You don’t consider that stuff at this point in the season. But that’s not throwing analytics out; it’s just tuning the analytics to the singular goal of winning today.
So much of the pro vs. anti-analytics debate is just a misunderstanding of what we’re even talking about. That’s the case with a lot of things in life.
So just one baseball game today and then NOTHING tomorrow. I don’t like sweeps. I want do-or-die games; let’s hope we get some as we move forward.
Thanks for reading!