Why is Post-Season Baseball Different?

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It’s another small sample size but a similar result for the Brewers, and it raises an important question: When do a collection of short series losses combine to become enough evidence to become a trend?

The Brewers have reached the postseason in five of the last six seasons but haven’t won a postseason series since the first year of that span, when they swept the Rockies in the 2018 NLDS. Since the final game of that season, however, four Brewer clubs that won a combined 56% of their regular season games have gone 1-8 in the postseason. 

Through those struggles, there is a clear theme: As Curt Hogg of the Journal Sentinel noted on Twitter, the Brewers have averaged more than ten baserunners per game in those contests but have struggled to bring them home, scoring less than two runs per game. Struggles to string hits together and drive runners home has been a persistent struggle for the Brewers during the regular season, but it’s been a near-constant in postseason play. 

A nine-game postseason stretch is a relatively small sample in baseball, of course. Even the 2018 team, which now stands out as easily the most successful season in the Brewers’ recent run, had a 1-8 stretch during the regular season on their way to a 96-67 record. There are a couple of takeaways from this postseason, however, that suggest that the formula for playoff success might be different from the regular season.

In the postseason a lights-out bullpen is a requirement, not a luxury.

It took the Brewers a little while to find the specific group that would cover the late innings during the regular season, but eventually Joel Payamps, Elvis Peguero, Hoby Milner and Devin Williams became a strong point for this team. This separated them from weaker opponents during the year, but most of the teams that reach October have also solved this equation.

Through the entire Wild Card round and the first two days of Division Series play, teams leading after six innings are 14-0 this postseason. Even the teams that came into the postseason with question marks in their bullpen like the Rangers, Orioles and Diamondbacks have been able to press the right buttons to put up zeroes in the late innings. It makes some sense that this would happen: Teams with bad bullpens largely did not advance to the postseason, and the playoff schedule makes it feasible for teams to use their best late inning relievers nearly every day. Nonetheless, the level to which bullpens have been able to lock games down is important strategically.

With nearly every team having shutdown relievers available, then, it’s going to get late early in most postseason games. This raises the value of scoring runs early and creates the possibility that teams would be better off using their top bench options earlier in the game instead of saving them to face a team’s best relievers in the eighth and ninth.

The postseason run environment is different and creates unusual strategic incentives.

Through those same 14 games this postseason teams are averaging just 3.75 runs per game, down from 4.62 during the regular season, and the playoff number is heavily skewed by a couple of outlier games this weekend. In the Wild Card round teams averaged less than three runs per game, and the median team scored three runs per game in the 2022 postseason, also. It makes sense that offense would go down in the playoffs for a variety of reasons:

• Again, as with bullpens, the worst pitching staffs in baseball aren’t playing in the postseason. The ten worst teams in baseball at preventing runs during the regular season did not qualify for October.
• The fourth and fifth starters on most teams either haven’t pitched yet or won’t pitch at all this October. Teams largely had opportunities to set their rotations to get their best pitchers on the mound early in the postseason and will skip weaker links when possible.
• With the possible exception of Saturday’s Diamondbacks/Dodgers game (which Arizona led 9-0 after two innings), teams have largely played postseason games as if every run counts instead of saving their bullpens by allowing struggling pitchers to remain in the game.

There are multiple ways to react to this. One is to lean into baseball’s offensive trend and swing for the fences. Baseball is increasingly a “swing hard in case you hit it” game, but that’s doubly true in an environment where it becomes even more difficult to string hits together. This was the solution Mark Canha presented: 

Mark Canha mentioned once again the importance of hitting homers in the playoffs. “I stand by those comments. You have to slug. You have to get on base...In a three-game series you gotta do it and you gotta do it in a short window. That’s the formula, I think.” — Curt Hogg (@CyrtHogg)

It might not be the only solution, however. As we noted last season, a downturn in baseball’s run environment raises the value of some of the game’s most polarizing strategies. As the expected value of an out goes down, it begins to make more sense to consider utilizing sacrifice bunts or putting runners in motion in an effort to steal an occasional run. For a relatively young and fast team like the Brewers this strategy could pay dividends.

The samples will always be relatively small, but the trends do seem to hold over time: Postseason baseball shows notable differences from the regular season game, and the teams who either fit or can adapt to that environment are almost certainly more likely to succeed in it.