MLB Playoff Takeaways: Divisional Round

Photo from The News Herald

In the American League, we will, once again, have a fresh matchup of new opponents compared to previous years.

In the National League, well, you already know who’s here.

Here is what we learned from the Divisional Round.

Rays defeat Yankees 3-0

The Rays are a better team than the Yankees overall.

That was obvious all year long, considering the Rays won the AL East. So it was going to be an upset for the Yankees to pull off a series win.

It’s not going to help when they continuously shot themselves in the foot over, and over, and over again.

Game 1? The offense does absolutely nothing except for one hit, and on that one hit, Austin Wells gets gunned down at 3rd to end the threat of scoring. Yankees lose 1-0.

Game 2? The Yankees defense has 4 errors early in the game, the Rays get an early lead, and the Yankees bats are quiet again in a loss.

They didn’t do anything wrong in game 3, but at that point, it was too late against a great Rays team to overcome it.

Credit to the Rays. They’re a great baseball team.

But they were never going to lose this series with those constant mistakes.

Guardians defeat White Sox 3-2

If you want to kill Guards ball, you have to get the kill shot.

That’s what the White Sox had a chance to in game 3 after stealing games 1 and 2 in Cleveland.

They even got an early run on the board in the first inning.

But then came the Guardians, winning 9-3, then 9-5, and finally, in game 5, winning 2-0 thanks to a 2 run home run by Jose Ramirez which was 0.74 feet off the ground when he hit it, the lowest home run hit in post season history.

And now, the ALCS is between two teams with low payrolls that play heavy small ball.

It’s a baseball purist ALCS.

Brewers defeat Padres 3-1

For years, the Brewers have been a good baseball team, but fallen short in the postseason.

Multiple wild card losses. Multiple divisional round losses.

Last year, they got to the NLCS, but still had to claw and fight against the Cubs to get there.

But this year, against a good Padres team, something felt a little different.

The games were close, sure.

But they actually pulled through.

They shut down the Padres late in game 1.

They were able to come back and beat Mason Miller, the best reliever in baseball, to win game 2 on a walk off single from Jackson Chourio.

They were able to close out game 4 thanks to an 8th inning home run robbery off of the bat of Manny Machado.

Something about this Brewers team just feels different.

Hopefully they don’t run into any evil giants that can stop them from getting to the World Series.

Dodgers defeat Braves 3-1

Ah. Well, nevertheless.

Look man, this is the Dodgers.

Freddie Freeman is a monster in the playoffs.

So is Kiké Hernández.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is turning into a historically great playoff pitcher, and when he isn’t on the mound, they still have Tarik Skubal, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, etc.

And you know what the worrying thing is?

I never even mentioned Shohei Ohtani during that, because Shohei Ohtani, the best player in all of baseball, didn’t have a good series, and they still easily took care of the Braves.

They’re just inevitable.