What A Weekend of Playoff Baseball

We're gonna see the NLCS we all expected--Phillies vs. Padres!  The 5 and 6 seeds, who both beat a 100-win opponent in the Division Series (the Padres also beat the 101-win Mets in the Wild Card Series).  But, you know what the crazy thing is?  They were both the better team in their respective Division Series!  While both series were considered "upsets," you wouldn't have known it by watching the games.  Which is the beautiful thing about baseball!

Right after the Padres-Mets series, I made a point about the Mets-Braves NL East race that I think speaks volumes about San Diego.  Whoever won that division was gonna be the No. 2 seed and get the bye into the Division Series, but, seemingly just as importantly, they would avoid the Dodgers.  What went unsaid was that whoever avoided the Dodgers also avoided the Padres.  And the Padres are a damn good team!  People are only now seeing how good.

A lot has been made about the fact that San Diego finished 22 games out of first place.  Which says more about the Dodgers' ridiculous 111-51 regular season than it does about the Padres.  (In 1998, the Red Sox finished 22 games behind the Yankees and won the AL wild card, BTW.)  The Padres knew they were this good.  That's why they got Juan Soto and Josh Hader.  Plenty of people are surprised by their run.  They're not.

You know who else isn't surprised they're making a run?  The Phillies!  Philadelphia benefitted from this year's new format.  They wouldn't have made the playoffs if six teams didn't qualify.  But, as they're showing too, if you're good, it doesn't matter how many games you won during the regular season.

That's the moral of the story here.  I don't think the Padres and Phillies were necessarily underestimated.  It might've been that the Dodgers and Braves were overestimated!  How could either one of them lose in the Division Series?  Well, as it turns out, very easily.  Because they were both flawed teams.  It just took a hot opponent to expose those flaws.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but you know how they say a hot goalie can win you a series in the Stanley Cup Playoffs?  It's the same thing in baseball.  The Phillies and Padres got hot at the right time.  They both entered the Division Series on a roll, and there was no way of stopping them.  It's too early to say if that five-day break the top two seeds get was a factor, but, frankly, I don't really think it mattered in the NLDS!  Because the better team in each series wasn't the one that won 100 games!

It wasn't just how those two NLDS played out, either.  It was the games themselves.  The entire weekend was tremendous!  The Phillies started hitting and never stopped.  The Padres' rally goose landed on the field at Dodger Stadium and wouldn't leave, then their bullpen completely shut down the Dodgers' lineup!  And the atmosphere in both Philadelphia and San Diego, two cities that have waited a loooonnnng time to see playoff baseball, was electric!

Meanwhile, in the American League, the Astros swept the Mariners in a series that was anything but a sure thing.  Seattle had the lead in Game 1 until Yordan Alvarez decided they didn't.  And Game 3 was a 5 1/2-hour, 18-inning marathon that ended 1-0.  Seattle, another city starved for playoff baseball, got two games for the price of one!  The Mariners' season didn't end the same way as the Phillies' or Padres', but they did their city proud.

Yankees-Guardians, meanwhile, has been a style of contrasts.  The Yankees have been doing what they normally do...hit home runs.  Then hope the bullpen doesn't blow it.  The Guardians have been hitting bloop single after bloop single, then relying on the bullpen to shut the door.  Game 5 was rained out, so the epic conclusion will have to wait, but this series is a great example of how being the "best" team doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing in the postseason!

Throughout the Yankees-Guardians series, Bob Costas has been hammering home a point that really puts what happened to the Dodgers and Braves into perspective.  A playoff series isn't about who you were during the season.  It's about who you are now.  Who's best-equipped to survive the month-long tournament?  And that's not necessarily the team that had the best regular season.

Among the Dodgers-Padres postmortems was an interesting comment made on either the FS1 or MLB Network postgame show.  Everything came easy for the Dodgers all season.  They never faced any adversity.  They knew they had flaws, but they were never exposed, so they didn't do anything to fix them.  The first time their backs were against the wall was Game 4 in San Diego...and their bullpen promptly imploded against a Padres team that might've gone 5-14 against the Dodgers in the regular season, but was the far superior team over the last week.

The Yankees are another great example of that point.  In April and May, they were unbeatable.  Then their entire bullpen got hurt.  That's why they had Clarke Schmidt on the mound in the ninth inning as they blew a two-run lead in Game 3.  A strength has turned into their biggest weakness.  Such a weakness, in fact, that no one would argue the fact that Cleveland has the better bullpen in the series.

Meanwhile, let's bring it back to the Padres.  They knew they weren't gonna catch the Dodgers in the NL West.  They didn't care.  They knew they'd be a dangerous team in the playoffs regardless.  That's why they went out and got Soto and Hader.  They're good enough to win.  And they're good enough to win now.  Which is exactly what they're showing everybody.

So, you can talk about how big of an upset each NLDS was and how much of a disappointment this 111-win Dodger team is, but they ran into a freight train and couldn't get off the tracks.  Are the Dodgers better than the Padres?  Probably.  Just like the Braves are probably better than the Phillies.  You could even make the argument that the Mets are better than the Padres.

None of that matters.  Having the better regular season record doesn't guarantee you a thing (other than home field advantage) in the playoffs.  That's especially true in a best-of-five.  The Padres and Phillies both won a game on the road, then took care of business at home.  That's all they needed to do to pull the upset.  But were they really upsets?

As John Sterling likes to say to his broadcast partner, "That's baseball, Suzyn."  And that's what we've seen over the course of the past week-and-a-half.  Not just baseball.  Playoff baseball.  Playoff baseball that's been tremendous!  And these were just the first two rounds!  I can't wait to see what the LCSes and World Series have in store!