UTK Special: Division Series
Playoff Predictions, Injury Style
First, “Division Series” makes no sense any more and MLB needs to re-name it. Better, what they need to do is a wholesale reconfiguration into four divisions in each league (which would necessitate the near-inevitable two-team expansion). Four division winners with two wild cards (or four, eventually, with the also near-inevitable Manfred creep) and a de facto play-in round as Wild Card would make more sense, if not be better.
Heading into this poorly named series, we have two problems, coin-face issues of workload and fatigue. For the bye-encumbered teams, how did they keep everyone locked in while also giving good rest and recovery? For the teams that played, especially the Padres, how will they recover and re-set their pitching with only a day of travel to do so, even if they’re just headed up the coast a bit?
Teams on bye did mostly the same things in public - light workouts, some sim games to keep pitchers on schedule - but behind the scenes, we’ll see who was more effective quickly. There were some vast philosophical differences, but I don’t know how much of that actually got to the players and coaches. These are all smart, well-funded and staffed organizations, so I doubt there’s going to be some big drop-off from any of them in the matter of a few days.
On the other side, no one was vastly overused. High pitch counts are nearly a thing of the past and if there’s fatigue at this stage, it’s easy to buy an extra days rest with depth. All the teams have four starters or more and the pens have at least seven, depending on how you define pitchers. (The gap is starters who won’t be in the playoff rotation, but don’t have a defined role aside from “if we have to use them, something’s gone wrong. I understand at least one team ran huge simulations on whether there was value to adding a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner and found that there was not usually the right player to add value.)
If you’d like to see something interesting on fielder/player fatigue, check this out:
Given a 1 for 4 on picks, maybe I shouldn’t do that again, but I will. Let’s take a look at all four upcoming series through the lens of team health: